Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“Oh.”

“It was terrible,” I said, agreeing with Rash’s unspoken sympathy. “A terrible accident. I’ve been a little thrown off and Jude, who was a good friend of Theon’s, was offering his help.”

“Theon was your husband’s name?”

I nodded.

“I’m really sorry. I can leave you alone if you want.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone. I mean I can be if necessary but you’re nice. You know how to have a conversation.”

“You wouldn’t know it by the way my foot’s in my mouth right now.”

“That’s my fault. I’m a little tricky when it comes to talking to men. I like to keep ’em a little off balance. Otherwise most guys want to walk all over you.”

I stared directly into the café au lait — colored young man’s eyes. It was all he could do not to avert his gaze.

“I hardly know what to say when somebody experiences a loss like yours,” he said with barely a stutter. “Nobody close to me has ever died.”

“You’re lucky. It hurts when they’re gone. And it doesn’t matter if it’s slow or fast, whether it’s a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they’re gone the world turns upside down and you’re left holding on, trying not to fall off.”

Rash gave me a little half smile, as if he were experiencing pain. I reached over and laid my hand on his.

“You wanna come over to my house for a while?” I asked him. “We could just sit and talk. I’d really like that.”

We took separate cars.

Rash followed my taillights east and then over the mountain into Pasadena. When we got to my house on South Elm I parked on the street and he pulled up behind.

I waited by the passenger’s side for him.

“Nice car,” he said. “Nice house.”

“Are you a gigolo?” I asked.

“Why would you ask something like that?”

“You’re talking about the worth of my possessions,” I said, feeling as if I were, once again, following a bad script. “So are you?”

“Not hardly.”

“What do you do for a living?”

He was thrown off, I thought, not so much by the question but the fact of my asking it on the street — before we went into the house.

“Um... I’m an architect.”

“You design skyscrapers and stuff like that?”

“Not so much. Mostly houses, usually interiors. You know, rooms and maybe a patio or two. When people are designing or redesigning their homes I sit with them and work out the possibilities. After that I draw up plans and maybe help them find contractors.”

“How’s that doing?”

“On and off. I pay my rent most months. I owe money here and there, but I got this job for the interiors of this new office building going up on Wilshire. That’ll see me through to the end of next year.”

There were stars in the sky behind the modest architect. For a moment I was distracted by them.

“You wanna go in?” Rash asked.

“That’s why we’re here, right?”

“Maybe you changed your mind now that you know I’m a poor architect.”

“Your job is the last thing I’m worried about, honey; believe me.”

Rash smiled and I took him by the arm.

We were halfway up the stone pathway when someone said, “Excuse me, Ms. Dare.”

A white man in an upscale white trench coat was approaching from across the street. He was of normal height and build but something about the way he walked gave a sense of confidence, even finality. He was familiar-looking — but I’d met so many people that he was to me more a type than an actual person with a name to be remembered.

“Yes?” I said.

He strode right up to us and for an instant I believed that we, Rash and I, were both dead.

“It is you, isn’t it?” the white man asked. “I mean, the last time I saw you your hair was longer and a different color.”

“Do I know you?”

“Obviously not. But it is you, isn’t it?”

“It’s me, Mr...?”

“Manetti. Coco Manetti. I called you.”

The evening was suddenly something different than I imagined. Now, before I could practice normal conversation with a regular guy, I’d have to survive the machinations of a self-made gangster.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Manetti. I’ve been getting hundreds of calls, literally. I’ve been upset.”

“I can see that,” he said, glancing at Rash.

“This is my friend Tom Vance,” I lied. “He’s helping me plan the funeral.”

“I knew your husband,” Coco said.

“He’s mentioned you. Something about having to work off a debt.”

Manetti’s cold eyes watched Rash’s face for a moment and then he turned back to me.

“Can I come in for a few minutes before you start... planning?” he asked.

I led both men into the white-on-white-in-white living room. Rash looked confused but he didn’t say anything to contradict the lie I’d created for him. Coco went to the long sofa and sat down in the exact center.

I considered offering my guests drinks but decided against it, because I didn’t want to leave them alone together.

In the electric light Coco had eyes that were dark brown. His skin was the color — and had the pallor — of death. Under the trench coat he had on gray wool trousers and a lime golf shirt. His shoes were real snakeskin and he wore no socks.

“I’ll make this quick,” Coco said as he leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “You know Richard Ness?”

“Sure, I know Dick.”

Coco smiled.

“Dick,” he said, “yes. Dick sold me Theon’s marker. It is now to me that you owe his debt.”

In spite of his ominous meaning I was impressed with his sentence structure.

“Oh. I see.”

“For some reason Dick was worried that he wouldn’t get satisfaction in the deal with you and so I paid him eighty cents on the dollar, knowing that I’d have better luck.”

“You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, Mr. Manetti.”

“You’d be surprised the blood I’ve seen.”

“Theon never told me about this debt,” I explained. “I haven’t signed a thing. And he left me with nothing. The bank owns this house and his car, all our accounts are empty, and the credit cards are as kissing close to being maxed out as you can get.”

“None of that’s a problem,” Coco said, sitting back and waving his hand carelessly. “The last time Theon was in hock to me he just worked off the debt — like you said.”

I could feel the hardness come into my face.

“You could come work for a friend of mine,” Manetti continued. “Two or three months of hard work and we’d be clear. Six months and you’ll be able to climb out of debt.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” I said. The words felt good in my mouth. My nostrils flared.

“That might be a mistake.”

“Listen, man,” I said. “My husband just died. My accountants tell me that I’ll be thrown out in the street soon. I have to bury Theon and catch my breath.”

“When’s the funeral?”

“Saturday at two forty-five.”

“Where?”

“Day’s Rest.” I could have lied but that wouldn’t have put Manetti off the scent.

Coco got to his feet slowly and yet lithely. “I’ll be there. If Theon told you about our little deal you know that I mean serious business. I’m not like Dick at all.”

With that Coco Manetti walked toward the front door and let himself out. I followed him and switched on the alarm system.

“What was that all about?” Rash asked. He had trailed behind me.

“You can leave if you want,” I said, pushing my way past him, headed for the kitchen.

Rash came after me, which I both liked and dreaded. I was still in the lead when we arrived at the kitchen.

I turned on the lights.

“So who was he?” Rash asked while I peered into the double-doored refrigerator.

“You want some banana-orange-strawberry juice?”

“I think I could use a real drink,” he said.

“In the low cabinet behind you.”

Rash squatted down while I poured my juice. Then I went to the little alcove next to the dark windows.

“Can I have some of this brandy?” he asked.

“Sure. The glasses are over your head. You need ice?”

“No, thanks.”

I watched him pour a triple shot into a squat glass. He seemed to be quivering a little.

I didn’t blame him.

He pulled in across from me.

“So?” He managed a light tone and I was impressed.

“My husband died in debt,” I said. “Some of the people he owed money to are what you might call disreputable. This guy Dick was a kind of leg breaker. Manetti is somewhat worse than that.”

“Should we call the police?”

“And say what?”

Instead of answering he took a healthy swig of our thirty-year-old cognac. Rash was wearing a buff-colored jacket, blue jeans, black tennis shoes, and a white T-shirt. Only in California could you find black people like him and me.

“What kind of work did he want you to do?”

“Do you want to be my friend, Rash?” I decided to speak without thinking, to find out what was going on in a kind of trancelike stream of consciousness. If Rash could flow with that then he could come along — wherever it was I was headed.

“I don’t know you well enough to answer that question yet.”

“Do you think that you might like to be my friend?”

“That’s why I’m here. Though I’m not quite sure what I’m getting into.”

Rash was smiling. He had a small gap between his two upper front teeth. He was looking straight at me without the slightest aggression.

“Are you gay, Rash?”

“No. Why?”

“Why does a girl ask a guy if he’s gay?”

“Uh...”

I had been in the business for too long. I was blocking the sex scene that this conversation would become on Linda Love’s or Roger Bonair’s set. The shy guy and the brash whore. He’s her husband’s clueless friend and she’s hungry for sexual exploration...

“Rash is a funny name for such a shy guy,” I said, trying to derail my knee-jerk train of thought.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yep.”

He looked around the room and I saw that I was losing him.

“Are you looking for a way out of here, Rash?”

“So that guy, that Coco, he was like a gangster?”

“I wouldn’t be upset if this was too much for you.”

“I just want to know what happened with that guy. Why didn’t you tell him my real name?”

“I told you,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice, “my husband died but he was in debt. Theon had a lot of vices. He gambled and chased women; he liked to drink good brandy too. Guys like that often show up on people like Manetti’s radar. I didn’t tell him your name because you are none of his business.”

Whenever Rash crinkled up his face, trying to understand what was being said, I had the urge to kiss him. I managed not to give in to these frequent urges.

“And what about you?” the coffee-and-cream-colored young architect asked.

“What about me?” I stood up from the table, reminding myself of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon.

“That gangster wanted you to go to work for him.”

I considered lying and, in a flash, I understood the femme fatale of film noir and noir novels. They lied because it was easier than the truth, because they had been invited in for their charms and lies, because the truth always sounded so guilty when they were just trying to make it through the day — like everybody else.

I tried to say something but the words weren’t there.

I took in a deep breath to compose myself.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Rash said.

For some reason the idea of love crossed my mind. It seemed to me then, in spite of the triteness, that love was an impossible goal unless you broke it down into pieces — fragments. I could love my father because he was tall and strong and funny, because he read stories to me and understood how the world worked. He loved me because I was small and needed him. Those two loves came together but they were not one love.

“Do you want me to leave?” Rash asked.

I looked at him, feeling that he was alien, like a high school foreign-exchange student from a country that no one in the class, not even the teacher, had ever heard of. Some kid who wore strange, dull-colored clothing and smelled like bread.

“What?” he said.

“You want something to eat?” I managed to ask.

“I’m still full from the restaurant.”

“Oh... right,” I said. “I forgot about that.”

“Why did that guy call you Ms. Dare?”

“Dare is my stage name.”

“You act?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Theater?”

“If you’re looking for an excuse all you have to do is walk out to your car.”

“Why won’t you talk to me, Sandra?”

“I am talking.”

“I ask you if you work in theater and you tell me that I can leave. That’s not talking.”

I grinned at that, appreciating the young architect’s ability to stay on the scent.

“How many nights have you eaten at Monarc’s since we met there?” I asked.

“Every night.”

“Why?”

“In case you came in.” He looked down at my hands.

“Kinda like stalking somebody who isn’t there.”

“I liked talking to you.”

“But you don’t like it now,” I countered.

“Yes, I do. I’d rather talk to you than anyone else I know.”

“Isn’t that kind of obsessive?”

“No,” he insisted. “It’s just sudden.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

He hesitated.

“Come on now, honey,” I said. “Tell me the truth.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?”

“Annabella. Annabella Atoll.”

“Are you engaged?”

“No.”

“Do you live together?” I had almost forgotten Coco Manetti by then.

“Uh-uh, no. We... we date.”

“And where has Annabella been all these nights you were waiting for me?”

“She goes to grad school at UCLA. She’s studying for her accounting finals. I won’t see her for at least another ten days.”

He was a nice guy but a little out of focus, like somebody you meet at a bar after the sixth or seventh drink — the kind of man I’d remember liking but just couldn’t recall the name of. I had been blaming this haziness on my depressive trauma, but just then I saw that it was Rash himself that was out of alignment in the world he lived in.

“Do you recognize me?” I asked.

“You mean from TV or something?”

“Answer the question.”

He scrunched up his face and concentrated. After thirty seconds or so he shook his head no. He’d have to be a consummate liar to have succeeded with an act like that.

“My husband just died,” I said, lifting the words up like a shield.

“I’m not trying to do anything,” he said. “I mean, I was, I am attracted to you, but I wouldn’t have even said anything in the restaurant if you didn’t want me to. And I came here because you asked me.”

“Kind of like a puppet.” I immediately regretted these words. I had been playing the hardhearted seductress for so long that the role was both my first and last resort.

Rash moved his head from side to side, genuflected in the chair as if he meant to rise and walk away, but then sat back.

“You just looked so calm,” he said at last. “Sitting there reading your book, looking up now and then with this little smile you got. I don’t know... I guess I wanted to feel like that.”

“Like what exactly?”

“Like I wasn’t all the time waiting for something else to happen. Like I was just sitting in a chair completely comfortable with myself.”

“You were,” I said.

“No,” Rash Vineland said.

He looked me directly in the eye. That’s what I was waiting for: for a man who had not seen or heard about my genitals who was talking straight in my face.

“Get up,” I commanded. “Come with me.”

I took him by the hand and led him back into the polar bear room. I sat him on the large sofa facing a fake fireplace and picked up a nacre-plated remote-control unit.

“My full stage name is Debbie Dare,” I said. “Have you ever heard that name?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is Annabella pretty?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Very pretty?”

He nodded.

“Why did you start talking to me at the restaurant?” I asked him. “I mean, I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my dress looked like it came from a Salvation Army box.”

“I already told you. It was the way you looked out,” he said, “like you were really seeing something. When I saw you I wanted to know what you were thinking, who you were.”

“And what about now?”

He stared for a moment and then nodded.

I smiled.

“It’s not going to be easy getting to know me, Rash Vineland,” I said. “Annabella won’t like you being my friend and the friendship will be hard on you.”

He took in a deep breath through his nose and then exhaled through his mouth.

“The one thing that’ll be easy for you to do is walk away,” I continued. “You can walk out of my life right now or next week and I won’t complain.”

“Why do you sound so hard?”

“That’s the way I am. Can you accept that?”

“I’m here right now.”

“Fine. Now... before you can know who I am and what kind of friend I’ll be, you have to know who I was.”

I pressed a button on the fancy remote and the oil painting of white horses prancing in a pale golden field slid away, revealing a seventy-two-inch plasma screen. I hit a few more keys and a DVD hidden in another part of the house began to play.

The title of the Crux Brothers film Debbie Does Death appeared and Rash’s mouth fell open.

“Have you seen it?” I asked.

He shook his head.

The film began with tiny clips of me getting fucked in a dozen different ways. My heart was racing with panic but I made myself stay there and watch.

The story started with a carjacking. Debbie and her husband park at a rest stop because they’re so much in love that they can’t wait to get home to have sex. Hooded men attack them, kill the nameless husband, and drag me off to a sinister mansion, where they and a dozen more men with hoods perform extraordinary sexual acts on me. At one point four different men were inside me, getting off on one another as much as with me. I remembered somewhere in the middle of the film how Joey Crux had brought three ounces of cocaine to the set so that my inhibitions were all but nonexistent.

Maybe half an hour into the film, just before I was to walk into a door that had the name “Mr. Death” stenciled on it, I pressed the off button and the plasma screen went black.

This didn’t stop Rash from staring though. He was looking at the blank screen with the same intensity that he watched the flabby, ass-slapping story.

“Is your dick hard, Rash?”

“Very.”

“I’m not that woman anymore.”

“I can see that. Why’d you want me to see it if you don’t do that anymore?”

“Because I want to know if I can make a transition from what you just saw to the world you live in without lying and hiding my past.”

“Are you embarrassed about making that movie?”

“I’ve been in hundreds of films like that and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done or anybody I’ve known.”

“So are you quitting because your husband died? Was he the one who made you do... that?”

“No, not really,” I said. “He opened the door but I went through under my own steam. I mean, there are reasons I became what you saw up there but I didn’t have to do it. I wasn’t a sex slave or anything like that.

“I don’t even know if I’m quitting because Theon died. Something happened to me before I ever got home that day. I felt what it was like to die and be reborn—”

“Like a Christian?”

“No. Not religion. It was something else, something inside me that I didn’t want to see but suddenly I couldn’t look away. Not even that. It was me all of a sudden realizing what it was that I saw, like for the last sixteen years I had been seeing the world one way and then, for no reason whatever, things looked different.”

“I think it was good that you showed me that, that film,” Rash Vineland said.

“Why?”

“Because if you just told me I wouldn’t have understood. I mean, I would have thought I did, but really I had to see it with you sitting there to know what was and what wasn’t.”

We sat there next to each other in the bright white room, lost in our own thoughts about reality and truth. The flesh around Rash’s eyes crinkled with the attempt to understand but I was dead set on not kissing him — or any other man.

“Do you want to spend the night?” I asked him.

Again he hesitated. This time I smiled.

“We’re not going to have sex,” I assured him. “And it’s not because you have a girlfriend. I just want to have some friendship from someone who doesn’t fuck or fight for a living.”

“Do you, um, usually sleep with your friends?”

“Tonight I am.”

After showing my nervous new friend to the bedroom I went to the bathroom, where Theon died, took off my dress, and put on a cream-colored slip. Rash had stripped down to his boxers while I was gone. I could see the erection straining against the fabric.

“Across the hall is a guest bedroom,” I said. “If you have to come you can go over there and do what you need to do. We have a cleaning lady, at least for a little while longer, so you don’t have to straighten up.”

“Maybe, maybe I’ll go over there for a little while right now,” he said.

After he was gone I turned off all the lights except for the reading lamp. I went to Theon’s night table and rummaged around until I located the one book he had always intended to read but never did, The Twelve Caesars, the ancient text about the private and public lives of some of the most powerful men in history.

Theon had that book as a kind of counterbalance to my ever-changing library, but it was more than that. Theon saw himself as some kind of working royalty. He was king of the fuck flicks in the old days when he made a movie every week. Even after his star waned and he began living off my money and fame he acted as if everything centered around him. The historical work was a kind of talisman for his ego.

I decided to read it for him as an offering to his death.

I had just settled in and opened the book to the preface when Rash came back into the bedroom.

“That was quick,” I said.

“I don’t usually watch films like that. My parents thought they were trash and every girlfriend I ever had was too proper to want to see one.”

“You could have watched it with some guys,” I suggested, putting The Twelve Caesars to rest on the night table.

“I get nervous around guys even when they’re just talking about sex,” he said as he got under the covers.

I cut off the light and turned my back to him. For a long while he lay behind me, motionless.

“Hold me, Rash.”

He curled up behind me, managing to get his arm around me without caressing my breasts. He exhaled with some strength and then did so again. After that his breathing was normal — for a while.

“I have a son,” I said.

“How old is he?”

“Five. He’ll be six in December.”

“Where is he?”

“At my stepsister’s house.”

“While you go through this funeral stuff?”

“No. He lives with her. My brother Cornell was trying to find me unfit to raise a child when I was pregnant and so Delilah took Edison in.”

“Edison’s a nice name.”

Rash managed to say just the right thing even though he wasn’t trying.

“It’s my father’s brother’s name. He raised my father and one time, when I was a little girl talking about when I grew up and became a mom, my dad said that the only thing he wanted was if I had a son that I’d name him Edison after my dead uncle.”

“That’s the perfect way to honor your father,” Rash said, and I pulled his arms up to my breast.

For a moment he held his breath.

“Um,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Why aren’t we having sex?”

“I’m not,” I said. “You have the room across the hall.”

“Uh, okay, but why aren’t you?”

“In the last four weeks I’ve had unprotected sex with at least sixteen men and almost as many women. We all have regular checkups and most of us are professional enough not to work if we think we’re sick. But I won’t know about my health for sure until at least nine months from my last sexual encounter.

“And even if that wasn’t true, you have to know that sex to me is like cornflakes or toothpaste. I don’t connect it with love or even mild concern. I don’t anticipate sex; I dread it.

“That’s why I brought you to bed.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re sweet and considerate and I knew from the first minute we talked that you would keep it in your pants and hold me anyway.”

“Um, you know, I think I have to go in the other room for a while again. I’ll be back.”

I started counting when Rash got up from the bed. I made it to seventy-eight before he returned and embraced me again.

I could feel his heart thundering against my back.

This made me smile.

“Why?” I whispered.

“Why what?” His voice was husky and deep.

“Why are you staying with me?”

“Because ever since I met you I wanted to see you again. But I thought that you would just smile maybe or say hi. I was hoping that if you came in, you wouldn’t walk out after seeing me, and I hoped you’d let me sit at your table.”

I hummed and hugged his hand to my cheek.

“Why do you want me to stay with you?” he asked.

“I told you already... because I want a man to hold me and to hold back at the same time,” I said.

“And you expect this man to hold back for nine months?”

“At least.”

He let go of me then and got out of bed.

“Are you leaving?” the girl inside me asked.

“Just goin’ across the hall for a bit.”

He made two more trips to the guest bedroom in the night. I woke up each time he left but fell back to sleep almost immediately. Each time he returned he held me tighter, with more conviction. And each time I felt more and more centered in myself.

When I awoke in the morning we were sleeping across the bed from each other. I leaned over him and tickled the tip of his nose until he opened his eyes.

I felt fresh and happy; he looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

“This friendship really is gonna be too hard on you, huh, Rash Vineland?” I opined.

“No.”

That was the first moment of real fear that I’d felt in what seemed like years. It was as if Rash had reached into my chest and grabbed hold of my insides.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. I have to go somewhere.”

“Can I come?”

“No. I have to put on some clothes.”

“Can I watch?”

“No,” I said playfully. “Go out to the kitchen and make us some breakfast.”

Rash could cook. He made cheese omelets and bacon with home fries seasoned with onions, bell peppers, and jalapeños. He even made coffee and served me banana-orange-strawberry juice.

“What would Annabella say about all this?” I asked after he served the meal.

Almost immediately I regretted the question. Rash’s face scrunched up and his mouth twisted as if he’d eaten something bitter.

“I can’t worry about that,” he said. “I mean, the way I think about it is, how’d I feel if she did that? But it’s not just the doing.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh. The problem is if some guy made her feel the way you do me.”

“How do I make you feel?” I asked, thinking, Shut up, girl.

“Like I was floating out in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “Like I could rise up in the sky like evaporation. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense but there it is.”

“It’s Sunday,” I said. “People have those feelings on Sundays.”

Rash grinned and nodded.

I knew that I had gone too far with him even without having sex.

“Should we stop this now?” I asked.

He got that look again, the one he had the first time in the restaurant when I told him I had to leave.

“I don’t want to stop,” he said.

“It might cost you.”

“What am I saving for if not for this?”

“I have your number in my purse,” I said, thinking that there was also a loaded gun in there. “I’ll call tonight.”

“Can I have your number too?”

I scribbled it down for him and tore the leaf out of my journal.

He got up and walked to the doorway, then stopped and walked all the way back to kiss my cheek. I didn’t kiss him. I knew better.

Rock of Ages House of Worship had grown since I was a little girl. When I was small the church was too: a little mauve-colored bungalow on a big lot at the dead end of a small downtown block. Now it was a stone fortress standing as high as a five-story building, with three thousand seats and twice that many active members. The parking lot was protected by high fences. The driveway had three uniformed guards.

They let my Jaguar into the lot. The chief security man pointed me to one of the few open parking spaces.

I made my way down a flagstone path to the side door of the church. Music was already playing, a huge choir was singing “Jericho,” and the assembled worshipers were on their feet singing along. There were huge stained-glass windows installed side by side down both walls, and a high platform where the choir sang, and an even higher dais where the preacher would give his sermon.

I was wearing a dark blue dress that came down to my calves and slightly lighter blue medium-heeled shoes. My wide-brimmed straw hat was of a fine weave and white in color. I carried a maroon handbag and wore aqua calfskin gloves that I had taken home from a movie I’d made.

I stood in the back looking around the assembled congregation, listening to the music, trying to feel like I belonged.

On the right side of the auditorium I first recognized Newland, my younger brother. He was standing next to my mom. On her other side was Cornell and past him a woman I didn’t recognize. Behind them was my father’s adopted daughter by an earlier marriage — Delilah — and next to her, singing his heart out, was Edison, my son.

I would have known Eddie if he was a full-grown man, but I only ever saw him on holidays, when I wasn’t working.

I made my way over to the Peel clan. I reached past an Asian woman standing on the aisle and touched Newland’s shoulder while the room cried out in praise-song. Looking at me, uncomprehending at first, Newland’s smile of recognition was a memory that I’d hold dear for the rest of my life.

He whispered something to the small Asian woman and she came out in the aisle, signaling with her hands for me to take her place.

I moved next to Newland and he gave me a one-armed hug.

“Sandy,” he said in my ear. “Mom’ll be so happy you’re here.”

I glanced at the profile of my mother, who hadn’t seen me yet, and saw over her shoulder Cornell’s face. He was lighter skinned than Newland and I and of a heavy build. There was some hair on his chin, but not quite a beard, and a scowl for me that had not changed since the first time the police brought me home and my mother spent the night crying.

The song was nearing its high point. I could hear Edison’s singing in my ears. I closed my eyes and girded myself for the fights and recriminations, for the forgiveness and the loss that would not be dispelled by my brief return.

The singing was over and we all sat looking up at the seated choir hovered over by the empty sky-blue pulpit.

The gospel group’s robes were dark red with cream lapels that went all the way down the front. They sat with military precision, waiting for the next movement in the Lord’s day.

Cornell was staring at me.

My mother realized this and looked my way. Her smile was immediate and she gave me a little wave. She inhaled through her nostrils and held that breath for three or four beats.

I looked away and toward the front of the church. A small woman in ministerial black was making her way, rather inelegantly, up to the platform.

She reminded me of a bug trying to negotiate an unfamiliar vertical climb.

Finally she made it to the podium.

“Good Sunday, brothers and sisters,” she said in a voice that was multitoned, like a jazz trumpet in the hands of a master.

“Good Sunday,” two thousand or more throats murmured and declared.

“I want to thank Brother Elbert and his lovely choir for their singing and Sister Eloise for her organ and this congregation for your voices raised in song and devotion.”

A tremor seemed to go through the audience, a kind of collective hum of satisfaction.

“I know there are many of you out there who come to church each week because you know I don’t mess around...”

Laughter.

“I don’t love the sound of my own voice and I don’t waste time telling you what you already know. I don’t need to tell ya that if you lied this week, or if you cheated someone, that you sinned. You know if you sinned. You know if you did wrong. You don’t need a minister for that.”

“Teach,” someone cried out.

“You don’t need a minister to follow you to the den of iniquity and tell you that you shouldn’t be there. You don’t need me to see you beat your children or your spouse in order for you to know that you did wrong. When you use the Lord’s name in vain you got ears to hear it. And when you turn your back to suffering it’s not my job to point and say, ‘Look there.’ ”

The minister opened her eyes so wide that I could appreciate it from my seat.

“No. That’s not my job,” she continued. “You’ve all been to church before. You’ve heard all, or nearly all, the stories in the Bible. You know about Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babylon, the pharaohs, Moses, Abraham, and our savior on the cross. You know. I don’t have to tell ya about Noah’s ark navigating the great flood, or John the Baptist. I don’t have to talk about Judas’s role at the Last Supper or quote some verse you might not yet have heard. There’s a Bible you can read for yourself in a forgotten drawer in your house...”

More laughter. Even I smiled. I still had my childhood white leather-bound testaments in a drawer at home.

“You can turn the page just as easily as I can. You can get down on your knees without me askin’ it. I’m not here to tell you stories of long ago and far away. I’m not here to point out sin and throw stones. I got my own sins to atone for. I got my own glass house.”

“Amen,” a woman cried.

“Preach,” a fellow parishioner replied.

“I’m tellin’ you,” the minister said. “I’m tellin’ you here and now that this pulpit does not raise me up above you. It doesn’t make me smarter or better, not one whit closer to God. We are all in the same soup down here. And every day we have to reach out” — she raised her arms above her head — “and try to touch Him and feel Him and love Him and most of all we have to do His work.”

The lady minister looked around the silent room. She had us all at that moment.

She was an older woman. Her skin was the brown of an overripe melon. Her face was clear of worry.

“I’m not gonna preach old stories that you’ve heard a thousand times,” she said. “That kind of preachin’ is for the children who are just now learnin’ the path up... and the road down.

“What I’m talkin’ about is you and me and what we might do to make this world something that reflects the teachings of all the great prophets.”

She stopped again and rubbed her nose with the fingers of her left hand.

“Ruby Jenkins,” she said. “Does anybody out there know Ruby?”

She looked around but no one replied.

“Ruby Jenkins,” the preacher intoned. “She lives six and a half blocks from this church. Ruby has an illegal room at the back of a commercial property. She also has a fever and infected sores on her feet and back. I hear that she’s from Tennessee and her family has moved on from these parts. She’s an old woman but she looks older and she feels pain every day. She don’t sleep and she cain’t walk because of her fever and her feet. She cain’t come to God and I believe that God is wondering why no one goes to her. Because you know God does not reside in this house. The omnipotent spirit is not prisoner on Sundays to us in our best clothes and on our best behavior.”

The minister — I never learned her name — looked around the room telling us with her silence to consider her words.

“No,” she continued after that exquisite quietude, “God is not ours. We belong to Him. We are here to do His work. His home is in that back room with Ruby and in the jail cell with some’a your sons and daughters and their friends. He might not even be here today. Your prayers might be on the back burners, in a saved file like in some giant computer. God might not get to readin’ your prayers for a thousand years because He is worried about suffering and the pain that we ignore in this fine house we’ve built.

“But you have to understand, brothers and sisters, that this building looks beautiful in your eyes but it’s no more than Ruby Jenkins’s room in the eyes of the Lord. You come here to plan your baptisms and say your prayers, to hear stale Bible stories and compare hats. But out there” — the minister pointed to her left — “out there is the real cathedral. This earth is God’s palace and real prayer is the succor of sufferin’ in His name.

“Ruby Jenkins is one in ten thousand lost and ailing, ten million. There are hungry children and drunken men, women sellin’ their bodies and wise men plannin’ the murders of millions callin’ themselves God-fearing and thinkin’ about sainthood.

“Prayer for us, brothers and sisters, is not the childhood, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’ That kind of psalm is for children learning to respect and to give thanks. We’re here, in this room, to give a helpin’ hand, to reach out to the sinner and the lost and the suffering. Don’t you think that I or any other pretender to holiness can forgive you. As long as there’s a Ruby Jenkins hidden from your view you know that your work is not done, that your prayers are unspoken, that the Lord’s plan is unfinished...”

The minister stopped there, seemingly in midsentence. She turned her back and walked away, through an unseen exit, leaving us in the middle of her sermon like survivors of a boat wreck in the center of a vast lake.

It was the shortest sermon I’d ever heard and also the only one to ever touch me.

After a moment of confusion organ music began to play. The sunlight through the abstract designs in the stained-glass windows seemed to brighten. I felt for Theon and his flight from unhappiness; for Jolie who was on the same reckless journey. And I knew that I was, even at that moment, on the same road but that didn’t bother me.

“Let’s go,” Newland whispered in my ear.

The sound of his voice made me gasp and giggle. I stood up like a drunken woman and made my way to the parking lot.

Outside I was reunited with my family, known and unknown. Cornell, who was a few years older than I, glowered, and Delilah (to my surprise) smiled brilliantly. Newland had his arm around the lovely Asian woman’s waist, and my mother, Asha Peel, came crying into my arms.

“Sandra, baby,” she said.

I held on to her as if for safety in those complex emotional waters.

“Mom,” I whispered.

“This is Mi Lin,” Newland said as they approached the embrace. “She’s my wife.”

I smiled and freed a hand to shake.

She grinned with abandon and then laughed.

My mother moved back, holding me only by the wrists now.

“You look so beautiful,” she said.

Cornell’s glower became a full-out scowl.

Delilah lifted Edison in her arms and came forward.

“You remember your mother, don’t you, Edison,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Is it Christmas?”

“No,” my stepsister said. “She’s finally come home.”

There was a look of shocked delight on the boy’s face. He stretched out his arms and suddenly I was holding him. His weight was nothing, but my own body felt as dense as stone. Edison squeezed my neck and I had to concentrate not to crush his skinny little body in my arms.

A beautiful and unforgiving black woman came up to Cornell’s side.

The world around me seemed to be spinning. I felt like a youngster drunk for the first time. I had moved so quickly from one world into others. This action seemed to resonate with the minister’s sermon somehow.

“We’re all going to my house for supper,” my mother said. “You’re gonna come, aren’t you, Sandra?”

I wanted to say yes. I intended to go. But the overwhelming nature of that day, of the past days, slowed my ability to speak.

“You can bring Theon,” she said.

“Theon died, Mom,” I said, “but I’ll be happy to come to dinner.”

“I’m so sorry,” Asha said. “Not that you can come but about Theon.”

“I’ll drive you and the little man,” Cornell said to Delilah.

“No, baby,” my stepsister said. “We’re going to ride with Eddie’s mother.”

“Yaaaay,” my son yelled.

“Uncle Cornell says that you couldn’t be my mama no more because you did bad things,” Edison said in the car.

He was sitting next to me strapped down by the adult-size safety belt. Delilah was in the back.

“Is that true?” he asked when I didn’t respond immediately.

“Eddie,” Delilah said.

“No, baby,” I said. “What Cornell meant was that the kind of life I was living would have been a bad thing for a child like you. I was protecting you from things that could have made you scared and upset.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“You’ll find out one day, honey.”

“Do you still do things that scare a little kid?”

“Not anymore. No. All that is over as of next Saturday.”

“What happen then?”

“I have to go to a funeral and then... and then I’m gonna start a whole new life.”

“Can I come stay with you?”

I looked up in the rearview mirror.

Delilah had long curly hair that was pulled back and tied with a yellow bow. She had a cherub’s face and bright brown skin. One might have called her plain if not for the happiness she exuded. Her eyes were kind and hopeful.

She nodded at me.

“I want you to,” I said.

“Then can I?” Edison asked.

“Today is the first day I been back around your grandmother and Delilah and your uncles and aunts,” I said. “And so we have to take a few days to figure out what will happen then. I have to find a job somewhere and a new place to live before I can take you with me.”

“Is this your car?” my son asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe we could live in here.”

Delilah laughed and tickled Edison from over the seat.

He laughed too and pretty soon we were all laughing. Before we got to my mother’s house Eddie taught me a song about where the little lost donkey goes to get found.

My mother had baked three small butter-basted chickens with white and wild rice stuffing. She quartered the chickens and served them with broccoli spears and canned cranberry sauce. There were three apple-pear pies on the side table for dessert and multicolored pitchers of ice water sweating on the windowsill.

The house I grew up in was small but always seemed large. Even that dining room gave the sense of being a bigger space. It was crowded in there. Along with the people from church there was Winston (who was five), twelve-year-old Margaret, and a baby named James. These three brown children belonged to Yolanda, Cornell’s wife. Their father, I was told by Delilah, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Yolanda was beautiful in a rough kind of way and looked somewhat familiar.

The sensations of that room cut a deep and wide swath into my memory. The baby crying and Edison’s laughter, Newland’s perpetual innocence, and my mother’s sense of order and decorum. The smells and sounds, even the air on my skin were reminders of a life I once loved, then hated, and finally forgot for a while in a haze of drugs, sex, and glitter.

“Where’d you and Mi Lin meet?” I asked Newland.

He and his bride were seated across the table from me. On my left side sat my son and on my right was my mother.

“Online,” Newland said.

“Really?”

“Lin is from Hong Kong,” Newland explained.

Newland was dark and skinny with a round head like my son’s. His expression, since he was a baby, was always one of wonder and surprise. He never had trouble with the gangs or the police. No one wanted to hurt Newly, and he was always willing to help you if he could.

“And you were online pen pals?”

“One night I found this Web site about women from other countries lookin’ to be American wives,” my brother said.

“You should know something about that,” Cornell said to me. With that he smiled for the first time I’d seen that day.

“Anyway,” Newland continued, “I send ’em a picture of myself and my house and Spider, my dog. I told ’em that I worked for the post office and that I was a sorter.

“Then for a long time I forgot about it — it was almost a year before Mi Lin send me a e-mail.”

“I told him,” Mi Lin said with a pronounced and yet understandable accent, “that I like what he says more than all the other men, that his pictures were about a real man who lives a real life. His house looks big to me and I like a dog. I work in toy factory and save two thousand dollars. I tell him that if he pay eight thousand I will send him my two for the rest.”

“We were all so worried that it was some kinda scam,” my mother said. “We told him not to do it.”

“But I could tell that she was for real,” my brother argued. “You could see it in her pictures and in the way she said what she said. I wrote her back and said that I wasn’t rich and that I didn’t even have enough to keep her without her gettin’ a job, and she wrote back that she liked to work. Boy, you know I hit the credit union the next mornin’. I lied and said I was improvin’ my house, but you know I was rentin’ then.”

“So it all worked out?”

“There was some trouble here and there, but you bettah believe that Mi Lin come here and I married her aftah only three weeks.”

“I’m very happy,” Mi Lin said.

She grinned at me and I felt a brief surge of amazement. I realized that my little brother, the silly kid asking the same questions over and over in our backyard, had turned into the kind of man whom this woman could love and I could respect — that he had entered life with a steady gaze and even step.

Newland had surpassed me and that made me smile.

“So what about you, Sandra?” Cornell asked.

“What about me?” There was no love lost between me and my older brother, because there was no love to lose.

“What trouble brings you to this house?”

“My husband died.”

“And why are you here?”

“Why am I where, Cornell?”

The question threw him. This was a game we had played since we were children. I’d make fun of him and then he’d beat me up.

“Sitting at this table,” he said at last.

“Is this your table?” I replied, the playful, willful child in my tone.

“It’s our family table.”

It came back to me why I had left home. My father was dead and Cornell, for whatever reason, had decided that he was the man of the house. My mother was a helpless wreck and so I received the brunt of my brother’s misguided attempts to keep his world from flying apart.

“Cornell,” my mother said in a commanding tone I hadn’t heard since I was ten.

My brother looked but did not speak.

“This my house,” Asha Peel said firmly. “Not yours. You and your family are guests in here. And if you cannot accept and respect your sister on the Lord’s day in my house, you don’t have to stay.”

The silence at that table went way down inside of me. If I had not already decided to give up the adult film world I would have at that moment because of my mother’s words.

“I was just sayin’ that she don’t have a free pass back from the kinda life she been livin’, Mama,” Cornell said, grasping onto the frayed fabric of a lifetime feeling that he ran our family.

“She has a free pass with me, Cornell. This is my daughter and I will love her no matter what. And if you can’t respect her then you show me the same disregard.”

“But, Mama...”

“That’s all, Cornell. You have run roughshod over Newly and Sandy long enough. I am the elder in this house. Respect me or get out.”

Cornell cast a spiteful eye on me. We might as well have been children. He hated me for having a share in our family, and I dared him, for all his superior size and strength, to try to drive me out.

His adopted children sat around Yolanda, their mouths agape, their eyes trying to make out the new patterns of power in the room.

“Why you have to come back, Sandy?” Cornell asked.

My mother got up from her chair and walked out of the room. I followed her.

In her wake I realized how dangerous my brother had been after our father died. It didn’t feel like an excuse for the kind of life I’d lived — not even an explanation. It was more like a sudden comprehension of the lay of the land, an aerial view of a terrain I’d always lived in but never really knew.

My mother went to the kitchen door to look out on the overgrown grass of the backyard. She’d already changed out of her maroon Sunday suit into a blue-and-white dress with a complex floral pattern running through it.

“Mama,” I said to the back of her graying head.

She turned, I remember, and hugged me fiercely. She was shaking but not actually crying, groaning a low note of remorse.

She leaned away again as she did in the church parking lot, holding me by the wrists. When I looked into her face I saw nothing of me. My mother had a broad, generous look, where I had inherited the long and lean visage of my father.

“I should have told him that a long time ago,” my mother said. “I should have stood up for you and Newland when you were still under my roof.”

“You were just too hurt when Daddy died like that, Mama. It hurt all of us so bad that none of us knew what to do.” I embraced her again.

“But I lost my way,” she said. “I lost sight’a my children and they got away from me.”

“Not Newland,” I said into her lilac-scented hair.

“No,” she agreed. “Newly was always my baby. But Corn turnt into a bully and you might as well have been in China.”

I cherished those few words between us. There was no conflict or disagreement, no anger or need for resolution. My mother had been blindsided by the death of the man she loved, and her babies scattered into that darkness like frightened mice running from a sudden, unfamiliar growl.

“You got a cigarette in that li’l bag?” my mother asked.

“You still smoke?”

“So little that you can hardly call it smokin’. It’s more like I take a puff now and then.”

“Yeah, I got a couple.”

At the far end of the backyard, under the clothesline, my mother kept two folding pine chairs. We sat there and I took the nearly empty box of English Ovals from my purse. I brought the handbag with me because of the pistol it contained and the children in the house.

My mother took a drag off the odd-shaped cigarette and sighed.

“That taste good. You still smokin’, baby?”

“I haven’t had one in days,” I said truthfully. “I usually carried them around for Theon. He was always tryin’ to quit and then goin’ crazy when he found himself without.”

“What happened? How’d he die?”

“He got electrocuted. It was an accident.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“He was a troubled man,” I said. “Now those troubles are over.”

I breathed in the smoke. It was a warm Sunday and there were no words I needed to say.

“What you gonna do now, Sandy?”

“First I’ll bury Theon and then I’ll get on with my life.”

“Are you still gonna make them movies?”

“No. I’m done with that. It’s not that I think it’s wrong. I mean, it ain’t wrong to work in a coal mine for a dollar a ton... it just ain’t worth it.”

My mother grinned at the phrase my father used to explain his life in the street.

I kissed her on the mouth.

“I missed you, baby,” Asha Peel said to me.

“It’s been a long time,” I agreed.

When we returned to the house Cornell and his family were gone. Delilah had made lemonade for her and Eddie, Mi Lin and Newland. They were sitting in the TV room on the mismatched chairs and sofa there.

Eddie climbed up on my lap and Newland began talking, telling stories as he always did when he had a captive audience.

He regaled us with the minutiae of the huge post office on Central and Florence.

“... and, and, and our supervisor, Nia, is what you call a performance poet,” he was saying, “and Jack, her boss, collects guns. We got two musicians, three ex-schoolteachers, and just about every race and religion under the sun. It’s not like they say — we’re not all crazy and antisocial, but you better believe that no two people in that whole buildin’ see a glass’a water an’ think the same thing.”

“You think I could get a job there?” I asked him.

“I think you could do better than that, sis.”

“You work there, Newly.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But only while Mi Lin at school studyin’ to be a dental assistant. After she get a job I’ma go to school too.”

“And study what?”

“I wanna be an architect. I wanna build houses.”

I thought about Rash but didn’t mention him. It all seemed too perfect: that I would have met a man who could help my brother — maybe. It was almost a miracle that my mother had stood up and defended me when no one, except my dead father and maybe Theon, ever had.

It was hard leaving Edison that evening. He cried and wanted to come with me. Delilah held him up and kissed us both.

Newland walked me to my car.

“What do you think it will do to Delilah if I take Eddie away?” I asked my brother.

“She always told him that she was just holdin’ him for you while you got some stuff together. He expects it and so does she.”

“It just doesn’t feel right.”

“Nuthin’ felt right since Daddy died, sis. But we got to keep on movin’ though, got to.”

Theon came to me on the ride from South-Central back to my Pasadena home — not a ghost or apparition, not a hallucination or even a vision. I couldn’t see him and I knew he was dead, but still, he was in that car with me giving me the only thing he had in abundance: fear of life and suspicion of potential danger.

“Family seems like a good thing but in the end it’s always the family that brings you down,” he said, a repetition of a platitude he’d mouthed many times in life.

“My mother loves me,” I’d told him once.

“Many men have told you they loved you,” he’d said. “They thought they really meant it too.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“They say it,” he said, holding up one finger, “they mean it” — he produced another large digit — “but in the end they will cheat on you, lie to you, and rob you blind. And that’s just the momentary kind of love, where there’s no blood involved.”

“Some man think he love me ’cause he want my ass,” I said, disdaining the made-up lover and the remembered husband. “My mother love my soul.”

“So did your father,” Theon had once said. He’d been drinking and, as always when he was high, he went too far.

“Don’t you talk about my father, Theon Pinkney.”

“It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery,” Theon said, instead of backing down like he should have done. I remember being surprised that he even knew how to use the word treachery. “The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.”

I felt the pain in that car the same as I had felt when Theon first said those words.

My daddy was always supposed to be there. Why was he out that night instead of at home with us? Why did he have to catch that bullet, live that life, make it so that my mother cried for an entire year?

“Love makes you blind to your own survival,” Theon went on when I was too hurt to fight him. “And if it doesn’t then it’s not love at all.”

I pulled into my driveway after returning from the bosom of my mother’s home. I should have been happy about the love of my son, but instead Theon’s words were in my head.

The man grabbed me when I was closing the door to my car. As I was being slammed against the garage door I wondered if Theon was trying to warn me on the drive. Was he trying to tell me that the love of my family might blind me to danger?

“Bitch,” Coco Manetti said. “You think you could disrespect me like that?”

He hit me in the midsection and I threw up the butter-basted chicken and canned cranberries.

“Fuck!” he shouted when the vomit hit the left knee of his trousers.

As the backhand slap connected with my face I tried to figure out where my handbag had gone. I was no longer holding it.

“Mothahfuckin’ bitch,” the white mobster said, mouthing words he’d learned from the part of town I’d just come from.

I took a breath but he hit me in the stomach again and so I lost it. I fell to the concrete and rolled up into a ball. He kicked me and I inhaled while looking around for my purse. He kicked me again and I saw the bag but it was well beyond my reach.

Then Coco Manetti made a mistake. Instead of kicking me more he reached down to lift me up by my arm. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe he wasn’t getting enough satisfaction from kicking my legs and sides.

I didn’t resist the pull.

One thing about my business was that we had to stay in good shape. Our thighs and calves, butts and abdominals had to be strong to keep up those pulsing, derricklike beats hour after hour.

I kicked Coco in the knee and hollered for all I was worth.

Someone shouted, “Who’s out there?”

Coco’s fist slammed into the side of my head. There was a very bright light in my eyes as a murmuring of fear whispered in the air around my head.

“Over here,” a voice called. It was a familiar voice — the one that cried out when I screamed.

Time skipped forward then. I suppose I went unconscious but it didn’t feel like that in my head. I thought I had fallen to the ground, heard the various sounds and calls, and almost immediately opened my eyes. But instead of being on the driveway pavement I was lying on a couch in an all-white room with people moving around me. I was in the middle of a conversation with someone but had no idea what we were talking about as I came to awareness within a kind of semiconsciousness.

“Was this the man who attacked you?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson was asking.

It was hard to concentrate on the kindhearted cop. My vision wasn’t blurred but fragmented, like looking through a broken crystal. I turned in the direction that the policeman was pointing. There I saw two discrete images of Jude Lyon standing with his hands bound behind his back.

“Jude?” I said.

“Hey, Deb.”

“Is this the man?” Perry asked again.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at the guy but he was much taller and... I know Jude. I’d know if it was him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“We have him in custody, Mrs. Pinkney. He can’t hurt you now.”

I was reminded of the cops trying to reassure Theon’s mother about me.

I forced myself to sit up. There was the smell of vomit rising from my ruined Sunday dress suit.

Four paramedics and three uniformed policemen were moving around the polar bear room. One cop released Jude, who came immediately to my side. I was embarrassed by the way I smelled but grateful to be alive and comparatively unharmed.

“What happened?” Jude asked. His countenance was serious and very masculine. Usually Jude was shy and withdrawn, sometimes petulant, but at that moment he was protective and even a little aggressive.

“Some dude,” I said. “He grabbed me from behind and started whalin’ on me. I couldn’t really see his face.”

“Did you hear him saying anything?” Jude asked. “Did you know his voice?”

“No.”

“Move aside,” Perry Mendelson said to my dead husband’s friend.

Jude looked up in anger and defiance. Even in my fractured state of mind I was surprised by his strength and courage in the face of the police.

Finally, after a full five-second stare-down, Jude rose and moved to a sheepskin chair across from the couch.

“Same question, Mrs. Pinkney,” Perry said. “Did you recognize anything about your attacker?”

I pretended to think before shaking my head.

“No.”

“How about that Richard Ness?”

“He wasn’t that big.”

“Can you tell us anything at all?”

“What happened?” I asked. “How did you get here?”

“Your neighbor, Miss Alison, called nine-one-one after hearing a scream. When we got here we found Mr. Lyon kneeling over you. He told us that he’d come up and found you on the ground, that he’d already called for help, but we thought that he might have been your attacker.”

“I came over to visit, Deb,” Jude said, once again in the guise of his mild demeanor. “I was just worried that you might be sad.”

“We’d like to take you to the hospital,” a paramedic said. “It would be best if a doctor took a look at you, maybe take some X-rays.”

“I have my own doctor,” I told the sandy-haired, blue-eyed young man.

“I don’t know,” he said, doubting my decision.

“I’ll make sure she gets there,” Jude told him.

“I’ll need to know where you are,” Perry said.

The conversation felt unwieldy, like a juggling act with one too many balls in the air.

“Okay,” I said.

“You’ll have to sign a release if we don’t take you to the hospital,” the paramedic said.

“Anything,” I told him. “Just stop talking to me.”

It took a good forty-five minutes to get the police and ambulance attendants out of my house. Perry asked four times if I wanted Jude to stay.

“Yes,” I said for the last time. “He’s a family friend.”

When they were finally gone I asked Jude to go get me a glass of water while I called Neelo Brown’s private line. Neelo asked me if I could get down to his offices and I told him that Jude would take me.

After that things happened in a kind of jumble. I took the pistol out of my purse and told Jude that we’d walk out to his car together. He didn’t seem bothered by the gun or the possibility of meeting my attacker again. This brought to mind Theon calling him dangerous.

Jude drove a dark blue Cadillac.

I was sitting next to him drifting in and out of awareness. While driving Jude asked me questions.

“You sure you don’t know who attacked you, Deb?” he asked at one point.

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Because you know you don’t have to be afraid.”

“No? Why not? I mean, the police wouldn’t be able to protect me day and night.”

“I’d take care of you.”

“You? Come on, Jude. That guy wasn’t as big as Richard Ness but he was a foot taller than you.”

“Don’t let my size fool you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

I fell asleep for a period there. When I woke up we were close to the clinic.

“Did you love Theon?” I remember Jude asking the question when my eyes were closed.

“Sometimes. Did you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. Very much.”

When I opened my eyes again I was in a bed in a private room at Neelo’s clinic. The pudgy young doctor was shining a small flashlight into my right eye.

“How you feeling, Aunt Deb?” he asked when I looked directly at him.

“Like somebody dropped a ton of bricks on me and then jumped up and down on them.”

“I think you have a concussion but it’s mild. You’re going to have to rest for a day or two. Do you want me to call anyone?”

“Lana Leer,” I said. “Her number’s in my red phone. Maybe she could come talk to me later on.”

The ocean was a big part of my imagined experience after the beating. I was drifting across the surface a thousand miles from land in a field of seaweed as large as a continent. The floating vegetation kept me buoyant, breathing. The sun was hot and unrelenting. Now and again the air-conditioning came on in the room. The cool breeze made me feel as if I were dunking my head in the water below.

There was a deep concussive sound coming up out of the water. It vibrated through my body, making me laugh and shudder.

The sun wouldn’t stop beating down and the waters undulated. I tried to remember why I was there but there was no memory, nothing before the forever ocean and nothing beyond it either.

“Deb? Deb?”

It didn’t sound like my name. It wasn’t real. It was made up on the spur of the moment and stuck.

“Deb, are you awake?”

I felt flattened and dead, like a fish washed up on the shore then dried out by the sun.

I opened my dry fish eyes and saw Lana sitting on a chair beside the hospital bed. She was wearing a peach-colored dress and a cream fabric hat that flared around the edges like something out of the Roaring Twenties.

“Hi.”

“Hey, Deb. How are you, hon?”

“I feel it all the way down between my toes.”

“You look pretty good. The swelling went down.”

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Tuesday afternoon. You been sleepin’ a day and a half.”

I tried to rise and failed. My head spun and my intestines felt loose and watery.

“Help me sit up, Lana.”

She did this. I managed to get my back against the bars at the head of the bed, feeling that if I leaned to the side I’d fall over and tumble to the floor.

“Neel called me and told me you were here,” Lana said. “I called that creepy guy Dardanelle and told him to keep on doin’ what he was doin’ while you rested.”

“What’d he say?”

“He asked who was gonna give the eulogy and I told him you.”

I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. My thoughts kept flitting off in tangents about Coco Manetti and my brother — Cornell.

“Deb?”

“Call me Sandy, will ya, Lana? Sandy’s my name. She’s the woman I want to be.” These words invigorated me.

“Okay... Sandy.”

“You remember the name of that wardrobe and makeup woman?” I asked, then, “The one who used to be in the life but went to work for that movie studio?”

“Bertha. Bertha Renoir.”

“Yeah. Could you figure out how to get in touch with her and tell her that I need to talk? You can give her the red phone number.”

“You bet.”

Lana told me how they replaced my character in Linda Love’s film with this girl out of Georgia — named Georgia Peaches — who was four inches shorter and three shades lighter than I. She also had a thick accent even when she was moaning during sex.

Lana left after we had a good laugh and I almost felt strong enough to stand.

I was wanting a book to read when the door opened and a nurse came in. She was short and Korean, stern faced but still pretty in her light blue uniform.

“There’s a policeman here to see you, Mrs. Pinkney,” she said. “Dr. Brown asked me to ask you if you wanted to see him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Lieutenant Mendelson.”

“Perry,” I said to myself, imagining a road in front of me that broke off into so many pathways that it seemed like a fan.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” the nurse said.

“Yes. Send him in.”

For a moment the young woman stared at me, as if questioning my ability to make a decision.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know him quite well and I know how to take care of myself.”

Time moved in ripples between the young woman’s departure and when Perry Mendelson knocked on the door. I thought about calling my mother but Theon’s voice interrupted, telling me that family was the quickest route to demolition. I wondered about Rash Vineland and if he’d called over the last two days. And then there was the stone in my passway, Coco Manetti, who seemed to hate me for some reason I couldn’t quite grasp.

“Come in,” I said to the closed door.

Perry Mendelson was wearing a tan suit and medium blue shirt with a dusky orange tie. There were little clocks on the tie here and there, and there were other shapes, something like yellow commas. It was one of the ugliest ties I’d ever seen and for some reason this enhanced the fondness I felt for the cop.

“How are you?” he asked, approaching the bed.

I nodded and said, “Have a seat.”

We were silent a moment there, like short-term lovers who had decided, each on their own, that the relationship would never work.

“You’ve been having a pretty hard time of it lately, huh?” the policeman said.

“Yeah.”

“Have you remembered anything else about the man who attacked you?”

“No. Nothing.”

“But you’re sure it wasn’t Lyon.”

“Why do you keep asking that? Jude was a friend of my husband’s. He’s just a mild little man. I can’t imagine him hurting anybody.”

“So you really don’t know,” he said, as if he were having a separate discussion with another me in a different time and place.

“Know what?”

“Your husband’s friend is deeply involved with organized crime here in L.A.”

“That’s ridiculous. What would he be doing with people like Ness?”

“Ness is just a wannabe enforcer,” Perry said. “He’s nothing compared to Lyon.”

“Jude? What could he possibly do that’s so bad?”

“He’s a person of interest in six murders in Southern California.”

Suddenly I was no longer tired or light-headed. A chill ran down the length of my body.

“No.”

“He went to college at UCLA studying theater. Him and his friends made their money dealing grass and hash. But they ran into trouble with an outside group that wanted to take over distribution for Westwood. The gang sent out a couple of guys to beat up Lyon’s business partner and boyfriend. They went too far and killed him. The two men turned up dead three weeks later, and Jude formed a new gang that drove off the outsiders. Since then he’s been the guy people turn to when there’s no more talking. No one knows how many people he’s killed, but they know the number is higher than what they can put on their charts.

“I’ve been asked by the squad investigating organized crime in L.A. to get you to help them get something on Lyon.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Even if he wasn’t a friend, what you just told me is the fastest way to get killed.”

Perry sighed, telling me without words that he’d hoped this would be my answer.

“I’m sorry about taking off my clothes and calling you a perv, Lieutenant.”

“No problem, Mrs. Pinkney. Like I said — you’ve had your share of troubles lately.”

“Lately? For the past nineteen years I’ve compared troubles before getting dressed in the morning.”

He smiled and I thought, not for the first time, that we might be friends in a world far different from the one we lived in.

“You really are something else, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Call me Sandy. That’s my given name.”

“You have to be careful, Sandy,” he said. “I’m here unofficially, but other cops will lean on you. They want your friend in prison or dead.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a hit man.”

“No. Why do you like me? Why are you here?”

We gazed at each other across the small space between the bed and visitor’s chair.

Perry tilted his head to the side as he did when he didn’t want to tell me that Theon was dead. My question called up an answer that didn’t want to come out; it didn’t want to but had no choice.

“I spend every day talking,” he said. “I talk to cops and criminals, unwilling witnesses, family and friends, bystanders, strangers, and voices on the telephone. And nobody ever says anything that I don’t expect. Nobody looks me in the eye and says anything that means something. I don’t care if it’s a lie or the truth; that doesn’t matter. Some people lie to be helpful; that might be the only way to do right. But what I hear is the same old shit over and over.

“But everything you say is on the ground floor. You’re right there in front of me like nothing I ever saw.”

“I thought you were married, Perry.”

“I am. And I will be five years from now. I’m not talking about getting together. Getting together is what everybody expects. If I told my wife how much I like talking to you she’d ask if I wanted a divorce. She wouldn’t ask what is it that makes our life feel like it comes out of a box of prefabricated wood and plastic screws. I don’t wanna have sex with you. We don’t even have to be friends. I just want to do my job and make sure that a wonderful person like you survives this mess.”

“Wow.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

I remember that we both smiled and, after a few minutes, Perry stood up. He put a business card on the stand next to the bed and nodded.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he left the room.

I took in a deep breath and when I exhaled I felt healed. If I were of my mother’s persuasion I would have called myself blessed.

Two hours later Neelo, against his better judgment, discharged me. I was wearing clothes that Lana had dropped off from my new purchases. My Jag was in the underground lot — another gift from Lana. I had my blue bag, chrome pistol, and red phone. Life was flowing on and I wouldn’t have been able to change course even if I wanted to.

I connected the phone to the speaker system of my car and listened to the messages.

“Hi,” Rash Vineland said. “I’m crazy for you. I will do, or... I won’t do anything to be with you. Call me and tell me when I can see you again.”

I would surely call him. I worried, though, that his life might be ripped up over the feelings he harbored.

“We didn’t get to finish our dance,” Coco Manetti said. “I’m looking for you. So either you hide or you give me what I want.”

The one thing I was sure of, the thing Perry told me with a sigh, was that the police would not save me from men like Manetti. I would have to dig myself out of that hole alone — either that or be buried in it.

“Hello?” a mild male voice answered on the second ring.

“Jude?”

“Hey, Deb,” he said. “How are you?”

“Can I meet with you?”

“Sure. When?”

“Now.”

“Okay. I’m at the Bread and Chocolate Theater on Robertson and Olympic.”

“I know the place.”

It was a small, eighty-seat theater behind an Oriental rug store on Robertson. There was no marquee, just a glass-encased space the size of a movie poster with a list of the performances and events going on at the playhouse. The double doors were ajar and I walked in without anyone challenging me.

A red-haired young woman was sitting in a folding metal chair just inside the theater doors. She was reading a script and chewing gum.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Uh-huh?”

“I’m looking for Jude Lyon.”

“Judy? Yeah, he’s in the house. You work for him?”

“Yes. He asked me to drop by.”

“Go on in,” she said, and before I could thank her she was back in her manuscript.

The whole room, stage and seating, was brightly lit. There were carpenters and painters banging, sawing, and painting on the set. Jude was standing to the side of the slightly elevated stage, looking at the work with a serious eye. When I walked in he seemed to sense my presence and turned to look at me.

He smiled.

I gave him a little wave and he jogged over.

We kissed cheeks. He took me by the wrists and examined my face.

“You don’t look much the worse for wear,” he said.

“Neelo’s a good doctor.”

“What can I do for you, Deb?”

“Can we get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” he said, and then he turned toward the stage and piped, “Hey, boys, me and the girl are going to powder our noses. See you in twenty.”

As we walked from the theater I wondered at the many faces of Jude Lyon.

Whenever I saw him with Theon or as an escort he was a timid, shy man — not masculine, not flaming. It made me smile to think that even the bedrock of my beliefs was soft and yielding.

In the coffee shop Jude ordered us lattes and chocolate croissants. We brought these to a little round table set in the window, removed from any other seats and on display to the world.

We sat there for a while in silence, our food and drink forgotten. There was no room for small talk between us right then.

“So, did they figure out who attacked you?” he asked at last.

I shook my head and said, “The police came to my hospital room and told me that they thought you were some kind of criminal and that they wanted me to try to help them trip you up. I told them no, but I wanted you to know what they were saying.”

I knew from Jude’s blank expression that the things Perry said were true. His eyes turned feline, filled with the kind of trouble no one ever saw coming.

“I don’t need you to talk to me about it,” I added. “I just wanted to say that they’re looking at me now and you should be careful calling me or talking in my house or car or whatever. Not that you’ve ever said anything. Theon didn’t either.”

While I spoke, and after, Jude scrutinized me. His brown eyes, under slightly creased brows, could have been humming — he was that intent.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“You’ve been really good to me. And anyway, you were always nice to Theon. I don’t need to help the cops take down my friends.”

He sat back and picked up his paper coffee cup. Suddenly he was a mild-mannered little man again.

“Why do you act so different in different places?” I asked then.

“What do you mean?”

“I never knew anybody to call you Judy, for instance.”

Jude smiled.

“I love the theater,” he said. “The people there are so wrapped up in stories, and how they look in those stories, that they don’t pay so much attention to you. It’s like being in a thick forest where sound doesn’t travel far and the sun is weak. It’s like you’re hidden so deep that you don’t even know where you are.”

I nodded uncertainly and bit into my fancy French pastry.

“Who beat you, Deb?”

I decided to stay Deb with Jude. I also, somewhat contradictorily, determined not to lie to him.

“I’d really rather not say.”

He nodded.

“I never trusted you,” he said. “I always thought that you were using Theon somehow. I guess it was because I was so enchanted with him. He was quite a guy. Crazy and lost but he could be a good friend. He never told you about what I did?”

“Never.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Why would it? I knew you guys were friends. Even if it was more than that, we never had an exclusive relationship — sexually. How could we? I have lots of friends who tell me secrets that I’m not supposed to tell. If it didn’t have to do with Theon directly, he didn’t expect to know them, and neither did I.”

Again Jude took a sip of his coffee. He watched me as an infant might study some new person who had come into his line of sight.

“Are you wired?” he asked.

“No.”

He took a bite of bread and wondered some more.

“I need to know who beat you, Deb. I owe Theon at least that much.”

Something in his tone reassured me. I had kept quiet about the gangster because I didn’t think that anyone could help me with him. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Coco Manetti.”

“From Manhattan Beach?”

“I don’t know where he’s from. Theon owed Richard Ness money, but when he came to collect I pulled a gun on him. I guess he got scared, ’cause he sold the debt to Manetti.”

“How much you owe him?”

I told him.

“Theo invested money with me,” Jude said, “in one of my businesses. That’s what I do. I take investments, buy product, and distribute. A certain percentage goes back to my investors. I was thinking, because Theon died, that the profit would stay with me, but I guess the money he gave me was yours, huh?”

“I was the only one making a salary.”

“I can have what you owe Manetti in an hour. You could call him and make a six-o’clock meeting at a place I know — the Black Forest Restaurant.”

“Uh... okay.”

I didn’t tell Jude that I knew what the cops suspected him of. I didn’t expect to get the money I owed Manetti. I really didn’t know what I was doing. But I couldn’t refuse the cash. Getting Manetti off my back would ease my life greatly.

Using the number he called me from, I called Manetti from the coffee shop.

“Yeah?” he answered.

“It’s Theon’s wife,” I said.

“You ready to do what I asked?”

“Meet me at six at the Black Forest Restaurant on Melrose.”

“This better not be some trick,” he said.

After the call I drove Jude to a house in the Bel-Air area. He went in and came out with a small satchel.

“This is a hundred and twenty-seven thousand,” he said, “in two packages. The one with the blue X on it is seventy-two thousand. The other one contains the rest. Now you can drop me off at the playhouse, go meet Coco, and settle the debt.”

“It doesn’t feel that easy.”

“It will be,” Jude said with a conviction I found it hard to deny.

Jude’s certainty lost its strength when I was sitting at the mostly empty restaurant. It was an open room with a broad west-facing window. Light poured in over the potted bamboo plants placed here and there to break up the seating. I was sipping a merlot with the black leather satchel on my lap.

After dropping Jude off at Bread and Chocolate I stopped in a garage and took the plastic-wrapped package without the blue X and put it in the trunk. For a full fifteen minutes I considered picking up Edison and going to Texas or North Carolina to start a new life. But I couldn’t put my son in that kind of jeopardy and I wouldn’t leave without him.

That was an important moment for me. I realized if I were to survive, I needed to be with my boy.

I had no idea who his father was. Because of his dark coloring I supposed that he was a black man. There were about thirty possibilities. For some reason my birth-control regimen had been thrown off and somebody’s sperm made it through the war zone of my womb.

Theon was great while I was pregnant. He took on some directing jobs and spent the rest of his time at home. He wanted to keep Edison, but even if Cornell hadn’t threatened to call child services, I knew that our lifestyle would not be good for a kid.

“Ms. Dare,” a man said. It was Coco. He was wearing a gray suit that gave the impression that it was made of metal. He smiled and sat down across from me, an evil Tin Man from an alternate Oz.

I tried to speak but failed. I realized that coming there was a mistake. The leer on Manetti’s face told me that he now saw me as submissive. I had to suppress the urge to shoot him then and there.

“You ready to make some movies?”

“I got you your money,” I said, hefting the little satchel and placing it on the table.

“Seventy-two thousand?” he said as he shifted in his chair.

“Yes.”

“What about the interest?”

“What interest?”

“Two thousand dollars a day late fees. That’s eight thousand more.”

“Can I bring you something to drink?” a waiter asked Manetti. He seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Go away,” Coco said.

“Can I get you another glass of wine?” the waiter then asked me.

“Didn’t I tell you to go away?” Coco asked.

“I wasn’t speaking to you, sir,” the server said quite pleasantly. “I was speaking to the lady.”

“You better get the fuck away from here.”

The waiter might have been a fool but I appreciated him. He waited to see if I had anything to add and, when I didn’t, he walked off at a leisurely pace.

“One way or another you’re going to work for me,” Coco said.

“No.”

“You need to make a film for a friend of mine,” he said, “to pay your vig. We got it all set up. The shoot starts next Monday.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Manetti.”

“No? The next time I beat on you there won’t be anyone around to stop me.”

“Hello, Coco,” someone said.

He was standing right next to us but neither of us had any inkling of his approach. It was Jude in a very nice, dark Armani suit. He smiled as the waiter from before pulled a chair up to the table.

Coco was so surprised that he didn’t respond.

“Deb,” Jude said in greeting.

“Hey, Jude.” I liked saying that.

“What are you doing here?” Coco asked, if not with deference at least with respect.

“This is my restaurant. I own the place.”

“We’re doing some business,” Coco said, trying to regain control at the table.

“I didn’t know that you had anything to do with Deb. What’s in the bag?”

“Nuthin’.”

“I only ask,” Jude said, “because I gave a bag just like that to Deb only an hour ago. We’re very good friends, you know. Very close.”

Coco gave me an evil stare.

“I don’t appreciate people fucking with my friends,” Jude added. “I don’t like it when they try to extort them either.”

“I bought her debt.”

“You bought Theon Pinkney’s debt. Deb never borrowed a cent, did she?”

“Listen, man—”

“I asked you a question in my house,” Jude said, cutting the gangster off.

Again Coco was silent.

“You know me, Coco,” Jude said in a soothing tone. “I’m a fair guy. I don’t push people around. I mind my own business. But Theon was my friend and Deb here is too. You have no reason to make her pay for an act of God; neither does Dick Ness.”

“So what you sayin’, Jude?”

“Mr. Lyon.”

“What do you want?”

“Give Deb her money back and tell Dick from me that he should repay you. If he doesn’t like that he knows where to find me. If he needs a friend in some of his work he can call me then too. How’s that?”

“I’ve wasted time on this.”

“Time lived is an eternal blessing,” Jude Lyon quoted from somewhere.

Coco’s nostrils flared. He pushed the leather bag six inches across the table in my direction. Then he stood up, refusing to look at me. I knew by this avoidance that I was safe.

As Coco walked out of the restaurant I said, “Thanks, Jude. Thanks a lot.”

“Theon knew that he could pay off Ness but he died before we saw each other. And Dick and Coco know there’s no insurance in the loan-sharking business. Call me if you need anything else.”

Jude left soon after Coco. I stayed because I didn’t trust my legs to carry me or my hands to steer a three-ton automobile.

I ordered pounded pork chops with brussels sprouts and new potatoes and waited for the food to come. My mother was crying somewhere in a room far away and long ago. She was crying, night after night, because my father was out with his thug friends getting into trouble, breaking the law.

When he’d come home my mother stayed in the bedroom while Aldo poured himself a drink in the dining room.

On one such evening, when I was ten, I climbed out of bed and went to see my father while his wife dried her tears and waited.

“Hey, baby girl,” he said when I walked in. He was drinking scotch and smoking a filterless cigarette.

“Daddy?”

He held out his arms and I ran to sit in his lap.

“Yeah, babe?”

“How come you stay out late with them men an’ make Mama cry?”

It was a dangerous question. Aldo Peel had a bad temper and when he was mad anything could happen. I knew I was risking something terrible, but still I needed to know why my mother had to suffer.

Instead of shouting and throwing me to the floor my father laughed. He kissed my cheek and hugged me tightly.

“Does that make you mad?” he asked.

“It makes me feel bad for Mama. I don’t like it for her to be so sad.”

“You don’t like it and I don’t neither,” he said. “You think I wanna be out in the street with them fools? You think I wouldn’t rather be in the house with my wife and children?”

“Then how come you don’t stay home?”

“Because I will not be a slave, dear heart.” He took a deep drag off his cigarette.

“I don’t understand, Daddy.”

“This country is run by big men,” he said. “There ain’t too many of ’em. Most the men in this land is little like me and all the other men an’ women on this block, in this neighborhood. The big men put all the little people in cages so small that a little man or woman got to ask the big man to open the door just to turn around.”

“Like a jail?” I asked.

Aldo Peel nodded vigorously. “Except the do’ ain’t locked. The little man could walk outta there anytime he wanted.”

“Then why don’t he?”

My father brought his face very close to mine. I remember clearly the sour scent of cigarettes and whiskey.

“Because the only way the little people could eat is to stay in that cage like the do’ really was locked. Even if they just open the do’ to turn around without askin’ they don’t eat that week.

“That’s why I go out at night. That’s why I run with bad men and do things they say is wrong — because I will not live in the big man’s cage. I will not be his punk.”

I wanted to hold my father right then. I wanted to shield him from the big men and their power.

“Aldo,” my mother said from the doorway behind me.

My father kissed me on the lips and hugged me to his chest. There were tears in his eyes when he put me down.

My mother told me to go to bed and then took my father by his waist and walked him to their bedroom.

I didn’t go to bed but instead stayed at the dining room table, sitting in the chair where my father sat. I understood something that I could not have explained, something that I would have forgotten if I had gone to bed like my mother said. I stayed up all night, until the birds were singing and the sun reached around the far corner of the earth, because I needed to hold on to the sad truth my father had transmitted to me.

I sat in the darkness, and then in light, imagining the world as long hallways of small cells holding all of my friends and their parents and all of their friends. Giant men and women with bullwhips patrolled the hallways, snapping at hands and feet that stuck out from the cells. People were crying and moaning like my mother. Electric light filtered down through the bars and I knew that there was no sunlight or moonlight anywhere in that world.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

I looked up from my half-eaten meal to see a young white woman with bleached hair and a silver stud on the left side of her nose.

“Yes?”

“We’re getting ready to close up.”

“Oh.”

I sat in the driver’s seat of my car for more than an hour, afraid to turn the ignition. The scenario of the night my father kissed me kept going through my mind. I understood now, twenty years later, that X-rated moviemaking had become my cage. When Coco said that I had to work for him I realized that either I would shoot myself or him at that table. I would not, like my father would not, go back into that cold cell.

This conviction finally overcame my fears and I drove home at a normal speed, managing to keep my wheels within the lines but wanting to crash into every car and pedestrian I passed.

Anna Karin’s office was on Wilshire not far from La Cienega. It was on the third floor of a boxy brown office building. I was at her gray door by five fifty the next morning, Wednesday. I knocked and, after a brief wait, she pulled the door open and smiled. She was wearing a coral-colored dress with a string of light green stone beads around her neck.

The office was as I remembered: rented furniture that was designed for function and not beauty. I’d shot many a sex scene in offices like this one, anonymous rooms that some secretary leased on the sly.

“I like your outfit,” Anna said of the tan-and-blue dress I wore.

“Thanks.”

I made it to the brown leather chair that was there for her patients. She sat on a maple chair that had a checkered cushion as its seat. The window behind her looked out on Wilshire and there were paintings of forest scenes on three walls.

“You said that your first session was at eight, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then why did you want me here at six?”

“Because I have the feeling we might go over and I didn’t want to rush you or have my next patient wait.”

“How are we going to do this?” I asked.

“Nothing has changed,” she said, smiling. “We’ll talk and try to see where you are.”

“I haven’t shaved my cunt or fucked anybody in over a week.”

“Hiatus?”

“I quit.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I could see by Anna’s face that she wanted to smile; maybe there was even a laugh dammed up behind her faltering professionalism.

“I think we should start from the beginning,” she suggested.

I went at the story like a novice craftsman practicing laying brick. I’d gone over it a hundred times in my head and told parts of the tale to this one and that. When I’d come to the end I’d knock it over, a child with her blocks, and then build again — each time constructing a slightly different explanation.

The events were familiar in my mouth. The only difference with Anna Karin is that I told her everything.

I included the gun and my intentions to kill or die, the fact that I knew Jolie, and even what happened between Coco and Jude.

“Did you ever want to shoot Cornell?” she asked at one point.

“No... never.”

“Are you still considering suicide?” she asked at another juncture.

“Only when I think that I might have to go back to making films.”

I’d been regaling her for well over an hour when she said, “Tell me more about this orgasm you had on the set.”

“It was nothing special... I mean it didn’t have to do with Theon or Jolie — I didn’t even know that they were dead yet. It’s just that... I don’t know...”

“Do you often have orgasms on the set?”

“I’m too busy pretending to have any real feeling.”

“Then why did you have one that day?”

The question was like the sounding of a huge Buddhist gong. It vibrated in the air around me. Instead of ideas the experience of that room came back to me. I could hear Carmen Alia’s camera clicking and buzzing and the footsteps of the cameramen as they shifted with the gyrations Myron was putting me through. I heard Linda Love’s voice but not the words, and most of all, I felt the hot lights on my skin. It was music and it was dance and I was a dead woman being flung about in the pretense of celebration and abandon, and somewhere in the rising and falling, the lifting and heartlessness... I came alive.

“It just all came together,” I said. “The sounds and light, the pain inside me. It just all came together and I was coming harder than I ever had — ever.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact I wanted to get away from it. It was like I passed out on purpose just to stop feeling.”

For a while there we were both quiet. I appreciated the silence and wondered why I had that sexual awakening as Theon was dying. What sense did it make? It was as if, in some cockeyed way, we traded places.

“What will you do?” Anna Karin asked me.

“I like reading books.”

“What will you do for work?”

“That’ll come,” I said. “I have to finish quitting before I can start working again.”

Anna smiled then.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“See you tomorrow morning?”

“You bet.”

At nine o’clock I was at a park bench just outside the fenced-in La Brea Tar Pits, looking at the plaster statue of a great woolly mammoth stuck and being pulled down into the muck.

The red phone in the blue bag rang.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Aunt Deb,” Dr. Neelo Brown said, “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

The phone made some transfer noises and then a masculine voice said, “Hello?”

“Yes?” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Willie Norman, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I just wanted to thank you, ma’am, for putting me together with Dr. Brown and making it so that I could get my spells under control.”

“Neelo’s been treating you?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. I never went to no doctor before ’cause I didn’t think they could do anything, but Dr. Brown gave me these pills and this light I could look at and now I’m almost perfect. So I just wanted to tell you thanks from me and, and, and Tai too. And I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about my car. I can fix that myself.”

“Thank you, Willie. Thanks a lot.”

“And I wanted to say that I’m sorry about your husband. I’m sorry he died.”

Anna Karin asked me if I wanted to kill myself and I told her that the idea entered my mind only when I thought about making films again. But I realized later that that wasn’t the case, I wrote in my pilfered journal: The truth is I’m thinking about it all the time. It’s like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop — no, not only confusion but pain too.

In Anna’s office I realized that fucking Myron Palmer somehow jump-started me back to life like a woman finding herself suddenly awake after years and years in a coma. It hurts to feel all these things and to know that all I have to do is shut them off again and the pain will stop.

Just breathing hurts me. Feeling love for my son hurts me. The idea of the sun shining cuts at me with red-hot blades...

The phone was ringing again.

“Hello,” I whispered.

“Deb? It’s Bertha, Bertha Renoir.”

“Hey, Bertha,” I said, feeling real pleasure at hearing her voice. “It’s been so long, girl.”

“Uh-huh, it sure has. Lana called and told me about Theon. That’s a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. I guess he went out the way he would have wanted, though.”

“At least he didn’t take you with him.”

I was remembering how blunt and straightforward Bertha was. That was a real help in movie makeup; subtlety did not show up on digital shots.

“I’d love to get together with you and talk, B, if you have the time.”

“That’s what Lana said. I’m up north of Malibu on a surfing movie shoot. You could come up anytime today.”

She gave me the directions and I scribbled them down below my notes about death.

I was on my way to Malibu when the red phone rang again. “Hello?” I said into the multidirectional car microphone.

“Hey... It’s me.”

“Hey, Rash. I’m sorry I haven’t called you, hon. You wouldn’t believe the things been going on.”

“Oh, um, well, yeah... I know that you’re a very busy woman. I guess I just wanted to know...”

“It’s okay, honey. I wanted to call but I really couldn’t. This funeral thing has been a bitch, and I had to deal with that guy Coco.”

“Did you work it out?”

“Will you come to the funeral? It’s gonna be Saturday at two forty-five at Day’s Rest Cemetery.”

“I didn’t know your husband.”

“You’ll be there for me.”

After a long silence he said, “Okay. All right. I’ll be there.”

“There’s another call,” I said, looking at the monitor above the rearview mirror. “I’ll talk to you later.

“Hello?” I said, after disconnecting Rash by answering the next call.

“Hi, Sandy,” Delilah Peel, my stepsister, said.

“Hey, Deihl. How you doin’?”

“You wanna come by tonight, hon? I think Edison expects to see you.”

The sensual feeling of suicide flitted through my mind and body. I wondered why.

“How you feelin’ ’bout all this, Deihl?”

“He’s your son.”

“But you raised him. You been there for all his first days and bruised knees. When he wakes up scared in the middle’a the night you the one, the one he calls to.”

“He asks God to bless you in his prayers every night.”

“But you the one sits there when he gets down on his knees.”

“A boy needs his mama, Sand; you know I will not stand in the way’a that.”

“I’ll come by tonight. I’ll be there.”

The rest of the ride I felt a thrumming in my body. The idea of ending my life increased with the passing minutes. I had thought I’d left that feeling in the Malibu mountains, but as I returned to that enclave of wealth and beauty the yearning for release returned.

The movie, Surf’s Inn, was being shot on the beach a mile or so north of Sunset. Seeing the small production sign, and the row of trailers, I pulled in.

“I’m sorry, miss,” a young white man with reddened skin and bulging biceps told me. “This is a closed set.”

“My name’s Deb,” I said, “and I’m here to see Bertha Renoir.”

The young man frowned. There must have been a few of the younger Hollywood lions on the set. That meant there were all kinds of fans and paparazzi trying to get in.

“Deb who?”

“Dare.”

There was a moment of stunned realization in the young man’s eyes. He had seen me in action before: my shaved pussy and swollen clit. He’d stared at my perfect-looking breasts and listened to thousands of my sighs feigning pleasure. He looked at my short hair and almost asked a question but then got on his walkie-talkie. He moved away from my car but I could see by his shoulder movements that he was arguing with someone.

Finally he turned back to me and said, “Go to the pink trailer on the right-hand side.”

“I know which one it is.”

Bertha’s trademark was the pink trailer that looked like it just pulled out of a fifties campsite somewhere in America’s heartland. Inside that mobile space she had clothes and wigs, every shade of makeup imaginable, and accessories from feather boas to leather bow ties.

“Hey, Deb.” Bertha was chubby and beautiful, probably in her fifties but she looked ten years younger. Her skin was delicate and pale.

“B,” I said.

“Come on in and sit down.”

On her makeup chair sat a barely legal white girl wearing only a bikini thong bottom. While we talked Bertha was covering the girl’s body with various forms of creams and powders.

“I’m so sorry to hear about Theon,” Bertha said.

“Yeah. Thanks, hon.”

“It’s a hard trade,” Bertha said. “That’s why I got out of it. Too many people died and too few mattered.

“Jo-Jo at the front gate was tryin’ to tell me that it wasn’t really you. He thought that because you didn’t have long white hair and a tattoo that it couldn’t be. Nice job on the makeup over the stain.

“Okay, Juanita,” she said, slapping the bikini actress’s ass. “You can go out and frolic with your friends.”

Juanita giggled and got up. She was short and thin, except for her butt.

“Miss Dare,” she said from the doorway. “It... it’s a real honor meeting you.”

She tittered again and skipped out into the sunshine.

Bertha put a sign on her door and closed it.

“I worked past my break waitin’ for you to come, hon,” she said. “So we have some time.”

She sat me in her client’s chair and placed her stool across from me. She didn’t offer me anything to drink, not because she was rude but because Bertha lived a life where you asked for what you needed or else you went without.

“I see you’re married,” I said, referring to the rose gold band on the wedding finger.

“His name is Tommy Blueblood.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Uh-uh, real name. I’m Bertha Blueblood now.”

“What does he do?”

“He makes jewelry from semiprecious stones that he polishes himself. It’s really very cool and he’s a great guy.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said, trying to find the feeling those words expressed.

“How you holdin’ up?” the makeup artist asked.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I mean, I don’t feel bad or anything. I cried once and everything’s different now. I quit the business. And even though everything seems fine I think about killing myself when there’s nothing else going on.”

“Are you taking something for that?”

I smiled to think that there might be an antisuicide pill in the world.

“I’m seein’ a shrink.”

“That’s good,” the chubby woman said with a nod. “You know there’s no reason for somebody to take their life away. Uh-uh.”

“You know, B, I came here to have you do something for the funeral.”

“I already gave that Dardanelle my credit card, baby. I gave him a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Are you coming?”

“Oh yeah. Me and Tommy will be there. He’s never met my old crowd and says he wants to.”

“Do you think you can come early and bring me some stuff?”

“What do you need?”

Bertha walked me out of the pink trailer and went with me toward my car.

“Bertha,” a young man called.

He was wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt and khaki cutoffs. A thirtysomething white man, he was handsome in a rugged sort of way. He looked familiar.

“Hey, Johnny,” Bertha said in a tone that let me know that he was important. “This is my friend — Deb.”

“Hi,” he said, hitting me with a killer smile. I could feel the strength in his hands but his grip was gentle.

“This is Johnny Preston,” Bertha said even as I recognized him.

“Oh. I think you were doing business with my husband.”

“Who’s he?” the affable star asked.

“Theon Pinkney.”

“Yes, indeed. He put up the money for a heist script I’m producing. It’s called Inside Out. We’re hoping to shoot it next spring. You can tell Theon that.”

“He died,” I said.

“Oh.” The actor put on an appropriate frown. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pinkney. So sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. “So... you think you’re gonna make the film?”

“You never know,” he said, producing that well-rehearsed smile again. “I want to. I get to play a homicidal maniac. Maybe if they like it I won’t have to do any more surf films.”

I smiled and nodded.

“It’d be great to get the script money back,” I said. “Theon died kinda broke.”

“You’ll know when I do. His accountants, uh...”

“Chas and Darla?”

“Yeah. They’ve been on top of my manager.”

“Hey, Johnny,” a young woman called from down toward the beach.

“That’s my scene,” he said to me.

We shook hands and he sprinted away toward the cameras.

“That’s my son’s college fund,” I said to Bertha.

“Theon was a good guy,” she said, “but nobody could ever blame him for being too smart.”

Suicide sat next to me on the ride back from the beach. He was the same olive-skinned gentleman who was in the periphery when I had my orgasm. He was sleek and cool in a dusky gray sharkskin suit, in every way someone you’d want to know and whom you were afraid of at the same time. His smile was understanding, even friendly. He was armed but wouldn’t hurt you unless you crossed him.

My fingertips were numb, my lips too.

Suicide smiled easily. He wasn’t Death but merely an intermediary, like that door left ajar at the side of the house.

I knew he wasn’t really there next to me but I also knew that he was real. He’d been my bodyguard since the day my father died. He was my exit strategy, my best friend and guardian angel.

Mr. Suicide was as tangible as the blood in my veins, as the midnight special in my purse. He was why no one could hurt me or bully me or make me into something I didn’t want to be.

Suicide was a messenger who kept in constant contact with Aldo, my father.

“What do you want from me?” I dared to ask him as we crossed Sepulveda headed east on Pico.

He didn’t answer but his smile was resplendent.

“I need you to tell me,” I said, even though I was mostly sure that he wasn’t there.

Stopping at the next red light I turned my head to regard him.

His race was indiscernible, nonexistent among the varieties of men. He was a god, perfection, as real as the sky and as distant.

A sexual friction was rising in my lower abdomen. It was slick and bloody, vibrating at an incredible, feathery rate. It was the feeling I had for Theon when I was living at his place but we had not yet become lovers.

His interim girlfriend had been Venus Moxie, a frequent costar in his various films. They would do lines of coke and fuck in the living room where I watched TV. Theon would have his eyes on me while Venus rode his incessant erection.

I loved the attention. It made me feel that he belonged to me even if he was with her.

A horn honked loudly and I realized that I’d drifted out of my lane.

I pulled to the curb on Motor and took in deep breaths. Suicide was semitransparent there next to me. Theon and Venus were memories threatening to become real in the backseat. My fingers were numb, my wrists were burning, and I felt like I did just before stupid Myron Palmer made me come.

Everything was sex: the soles of my feet, the crazy bone in my left elbow, the smell of my sweat and perfume. I wanted to get down on my knees and have some nameless, tattooed biker fuck me with his bent dick. I wanted Suicide to take me without having to give him a thing.

Was that possible?

I pulled up in front of the lime-green bungalow on Darton Street just as the sun kissed the horizon. The sky had turned an iridescent orange and black from the sunset, cloud cover, and air pollution. On the way I had to pull my car to the curb eight times to avoid losing control.

I wanted to die but every time I imagined it a sexual tension ignited in me and the wish for death turned into a need for sex. This agony was exquisite and depleting. It took a quarter of an hour to climb out of the car and go to the door of the small house.

“Mama!” Edison yelled as he flung the door open.

I dropped to my knees and he rushed into my arms. I held on to him as if he were a single jutting stone in the middle of the ocean and I was a drowning woman fresh from a shipwreck.

“How are you, baby?” I asked.

He squeezed me for an answer.

“Did you save your mama something to eat?”

“Come on,” he said.

He took me by the hand and dragged me into the manicured living room. Delilah wore a cranberry pantsuit, standing there like a saleswoman for a well-maintained furniture showroom. The sofa and its companion stuffed chair were blue and plush. The floor was dark oak, as was the coffee table.

There was a gray cardboard box in the corner, overflowing with Edison’s toys. I imagined him straightening up his little boy’s mess for me while I was out in my car struggling to survive long enough to see him.

Delilah smiled. She was shorter than I, with big eyes and freckles across her copper-and-gold face. She was a few pounds over her perfect weight and lovely to me.

“Hi,” she said with a smile that added intention to the greeting.

“Hey.”

“Come on, Mama,” Edison said. “We got pizza in the kitchen.”

It was hard for me to fit into that evening with my son and stepsister. Edison showed me his room and his toys, his books and secret treasures. I paid attention like a forensic accountant gauging the worth of my little boy’s life.

Delilah loved him and cared for him in ways that I might never be able to. He could read at least a dozen words and he could count. He said please and thank you without reminder, and he was healthy and unafraid.

In other words — he didn’t need me. Delilah had brought him up into childhood with no scars or frowns on his face.

He loved me but he needed what my father’s adopted daughter had to offer. And she loved him; I could see that love in each gesture and in every corner of her home.

We watched a cartoon movie about a little beaver named Barney who had been driven out of the forest by a fire and who had to make a life for himself in the city. There he met cats and dogs, humans and other displaced forest denizens, struggled to survive, and finally found a natural paradise where the waters were clear and there was need for a dam.

By the end Edison and Delilah were both sound asleep. My hands felt huge, like baseball mitts. My head ached and my legs were numb but ambulatory.

I put Edison to bed and then woke up Deihl.

She gave me a sleepy smile and kissed me.

“You wanna stay the night?” she asked.

“I think I better. I really don’t feel like drivin’.”

She got me sheets and a blanket and fitted them to the cushions of the blue sofa.

“Me and Eddie are off early in the morning,” she said.

“Not early as me.”

There are states other than wakefulness and sleep. There is, for instance, the kind of unrest when you are so close to consciousness that you are not really out. You’re still there in the world — just separated by a thin barrier of black tissue.

I lay there on the couch thinking about dreams and dreaming of ideas. Theon was there with me trying to distract my train of thought. He was grumbling that I wasn’t paying attention. My hands and feet were swollen and I said, “Give me a break, man. I’m trying to let you go.”

There were debt collectors sitting across from the sofa, each with a briefcase full of bills that they wanted me to pay; each hiding an erection in his pants, as interest — these two words, erection and interest, hung in the air unrealized and definite.

I was lying there in the darkness but I could see everything quite clearly. I was attempting to trace my steps backward from the parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard where I gave blow jobs for fifteen dollars and was just about to meet Theon. I was trying to back into the life with my mother and brothers, my stepsister and long-ago friends Maxine, Oura, Maryanne, and Juan.

I was walking backward, away from the smelly john’s car, down La Cienega Boulevard, past the vice squad police cars headed up toward the avenue. I was going backward in time but everything else was going forward. It was very awkward, moving in reverse through life, but I kept it up because I couldn’t live on the path I’d already traveled. I got all the way back to my mother’s house, my childhood home.

I walked backward through the front door. In the entranceway Cornell had a baseball in his hand but decided not to throw it at me. He looked confused and I smiled at him, moving past him in time and space, avoiding his tortures.

I made it all the way to the living room. There I stopped and found myself once again on the sleeping sofa in Delilah’s house almost twenty years later. The front door banged open and my father staggered in, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. The debt collectors scattered. Theon stopped complaining.

“Daddy!” I screamed, and he fell on me, bleeding and choking on the blood.

I came awake in the dark room no longer able to see through the gloom. I was panting, a prayer fragment in my mind. “... and protect Mama and Daddy from harm.”

My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed.

It was six-oh-one when I got to Anna Karin’s gray door that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been late for an appointment.

Anna smiled when she opened the door and moved her body in such a way as to invite me in.

I went to the brown leather seat as she sat in the straight-backed maple chair.

“I’ve been thinking of suicide every other minute since I left yesterday morning,” I said.

“Really? Are you seriously considering it?”

“No,” I lied, “not really. It’s just in my mind after we talked about it. Why do you think that is?”

“What do you think?”

“I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I’m willing to die no one can master me.”

“Do you feel that people are trying to control you?”

“Dead people,” I agreed. “Theon and my father mainly. They have a hold on my heart. I can’t seem to get away from them no matter what I do.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to pull away,” Anna said. “Maybe you should face their deaths and come to terms with the reality.”

“The reality is that I’m more a part of them than I am a part of anything in this world. I went to see my son, Edison, last night. He was so happy. He wants to be with me, but I know that he’d be better off with Delilah.”

“But you’re his mother.”

“And what do I say to him when he sees me doing a gangbang scene with three guys inside me at the same time? What can I do for him when his friends laugh and call his mother a whore?”

“You love him and tell him that you made mistakes. You tell him the truth and he will understand. Maybe not at first. But a boy will love his mother no matter what.”

“I just don’t feel like I belong,” I said. “I thought when I had that orgasm on the set that that was the moment I could let go. I mean, I felt what it was like to be just a regular girl even through all that I’d done. But then I got home and Theon was dead and all our money was gone. I tried to go home but even there I didn’t really fit. My mother feels guilty and even my brother Newland made me feel like some kind of alien.”

“But I thought you two got along so well,” Anna said.

“Yeah. He loves me but the life he’s living has nothing to do with where I come from. We don’t have anything in common.

“It’s really only my brother Cornell whom I have any sympathy with. I understand why he hates me. I know in my heart that he’d feel better if I were dead. You can see it in the way he looks at me and in the way I look at myself in the mirror.

“I’m just fucked-up and there’s no way I can undo it. There’s no going back and I can’t move ahead.

“You know how people say, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing’?”

“Yes.”

“The few friends I have would miss me if I was gone but they don’t know me. They look at me and see something they need or want. They see somebody that they would rather be but I’m not even that woman. They’d miss me but they don’t know who I am.”

With that I had finished my truth telling for that morning.

While Anna was digesting the words I noticed a huge vulturelike bird perched on the roof of the office building across the street. At first I thought that it might be a statue, some kind of public art piece, but then it shifted.

I worried that maybe the bird was a hallucination, that if I pointed it out it might give Anna reason to have me committed. I couldn’t allow that — not when I was so close to understanding.

I glanced at the kind woman. She gave me a quizzical look. She realized that I was looking out the window. The bird, whatever it was (or wasn’t), decided at that moment to spread its great wings and leap from the rooftop. It seemed to bounce on an invisible current of air. Anna turned to look but before she could the creature lifted up beyond our line of sight.

It was gone.

“What were you looking at?” the therapist asked.

“Nothing,” I said, “just the empty roof.”

“Were you thinking of jumping off?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“A big bird,” I said, “might be on its way somewhere. It could have stopped there to rest and then gone on. That building wasn’t put there for birds to rest on. It’s civilized and humanized but the bird doesn’t know any of that. She just knew she was tired and had to rest for a little while before going on to where her instincts told her.”

“I’m worried about you, Sandra.”

“You shouldn’t be, Anna. I’m on my way. I’ve been places I don’t belong and now I’m just moving on.”

“I’d like to prescribe an antidepressant for you,” she replied.

“If you think I need it — sure.”

My acquiescence seemed to soothe her worry. From there we talked about my father again and how bereft my whole family was at his death.

“It was like a bomb went off in the living room,” I said, “and we were all suffering from shell shock from then on.”

“Does Theon’s death bring up these memories of your father?”

This question was simple and seemingly unobtrusive — at first. I considered it. Theon was an outlaw too, in his own way. I had loved him as women love men in the beginning.

But did his death compare to my father’s? Was his stupid demise an echo of Aldo Peel’s reckless existence?

My father was a warrior, I thought, while Theon was a pimp and a whore. I was that real or imagined bird on the roof across the street from the woman pretending to be me. And Anna was everybody else, recording the complex interrelationships of men and women out there beyond the definitions of who and what and how we should be.

Theon was what Dickens would have called a swollen boy with an engorged member as his cross to bear. Daddy was a street fighter searching for and finding his manhood in back alleys and barroom fights.

“Sandra?” Anna said.

I looked up and out the window expecting to see a whole flock of condors waiting for me to join them or feed them. But the rooftop was empty.

“I have to go,” I said.

“What were you thinking?”

“I don’t have any answers, Anna. You can call in the prescription to Beacher’s Pharmacy in Pasadena. I’ll pick it up when I get home.”

Anna tried to continue our unwieldy conversation but I needed to leave. I stood up and waded through her questions to the door. Before I left I told her about the funeral and said that it would be good for her to come.

Driving back toward my home I got a call.

“Yes?”

“Sandra?”

“Hey, Rash. Are you coming to the funeral?”

“I am.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“I told Annabella about you.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“She’s pretty mad. It kinda surprised me. I mean, for the last year or so she’s been totally distracted and kept on telling me how things weren’t working. Now it’s like we were married and I was cheating on her.”

“If you can’t come I’ll understand,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I want to be there with you, I mean for you. I need to be there.”

“What if you lose Annabella?”

“Then I won’t have to leave her.”

Maybe I should have said something then. It seemed clear that Rash was using me as the element of change in his life. Rather than just telling Annabella that he wanted to leave he was presenting me as the reason. Maybe I should have said for him to go figure out his relationship with her before coming to me.

But I felt so far away from anything except the actions I had to take that I wasn’t worried about my hapless suitor. Maybe I even felt a little complimented that a man working in the real world would leave a pretty UCLA grad student for me.

Anyway, I’d be dead soon and then Rash could use me as a memory.

“Okay,” I said. “If you get there early we can talk before the ceremony.”

I drove out to LeRoy’s Chicken and Waffle House and ordered two full meals. I ate at an outside table, scanning the skies for that big bird. I didn’t see it but, I thought, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

After eating I went to a big toy store in Santa Monica and bought Edison a boy’s computer that had learning games and a place to keep his diary.

By the time I got home I was happy. There was a silly grin on my face and a lightness in my spirit that I hadn’t felt since I was a little girl. I wasn’t worried about leg breakers or bill collectors, letting down my family, or the loss of people I loved or might have loved.

Even my breathing was cheerful. The air felt good coming in and going out. My entire life had been leading to this moment. No one could take it away. I didn’t have to run or hide or pretend I was somewhere else while a man shoved his nine-inch-long, four-inch-wide dick into my rectum.

The feeling I had was exactly the same as when a young girl falls in love. I was in love with the beauty of finality and I had Theon to thank for that.

I got three sheets of paper from the office desk and sat down to write the eulogy. I sat there for hours writing slowly and surely. I didn’t cross out a word. I wrote the whole thing in medium blue ink from an old-fashioned ballpoint pen. It was a retractable that I had taken from a Best Western motel when we had used a room on the sly to shoot the final scene of Debbie Does It All.

It was well past midnight when I finished the tribute. I slid from the chair onto the carpeted floor and smiled at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.

That was the best night of sleep I ever had — ever. It was dreamless and seamless, dark and soft. Any lingering trepidations I had about death were dispersed by the peaceful ecstasy of those eight hours.

I still had a few sore spots from the beating Coco gave me but the pain would end. I felt sadness about Theon and my son, my mother, and others but I knew that the dead were gone and the living could go on without me — had been doing so for years.

It was a lovely, balmy morning. I went barefoot out upon the blue-green grass that Theon cultivated just outside our dinette. He shaded that small lawn from the summer sun and made sure that it was well watered and cooled even in the L.A. desert.

The spiky blades tickled my bare soles, exhilarating me. I was naked out there. No one could see me and that was fine.

I couldn’t remember the last time that I had solitude. I mean, I’d been alone often enough, but to know that I didn’t have to strip down and oil up, to take a preparatory enema for the afternoon shoot, to manicure every square inch of flesh, nail, and hair...

I bathed for an hour listening to Mingus, my father’s absolute favorite musician. I used lavender bubble bath and thought about Perry Mendelson. While I was sitting there, luxuriating, it struck me that I hadn’t turned on the security system. Maybe I was reminded because I might have heard something behind the jazz. The sound, I thought, might have registered without my awareness, because the moment I thought it Richard Ness walked into the bathroom — the same room where my husband had died with the child I could not save.

“Dick,” I said, only mildly surprised.

“I told you I don’t like people calling me that.” He was wearing a shit-brown suit and a green Borsalino hat.

“And I said that I don’t like you.”

“You owe me money, bitch.”

“I thought you sold the debt to Manetti?”

“He gave it back. He said that you had my money now and I’m here to collect. I came here to see your green or your red.”

“How festive.” I had to hold back to keep from laughing.

My obvious good humor disconcerted him.

“Why you got to be like that, Deb?” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“How can we ever come to an understanding if you lie to me, Dick?”

“Say what?”

“You want to hurt me but you know if I die Jude Lyon will be unhappy. And if he’s unhappy you might get damaged.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with him,” he said.

“But it does, sweetheart. It has to. You’re mad and you’re scared, so you came here to bully me to show that you can’t be bossed around.”

I’d hit the bull’s-eye on Ness’s shame. He grimaced and considered mayhem.

“You know I’m gonna have to kill you,” he said.

“I know that you want to, Dick. The only question is if you’re brave enough to murder an unarmed woman in her bath.”

He was like a lover who couldn’t perform. Everything but Dick’s dick was willing. He sat down on the toilet seat and glowered at me.

“You are one crazy bitch.”

“Yeah.”

Warm steam was rising from my tub. My breath was still magical.

“I’m gonna go through your house and take enough stuff to make my nut offa Theon.”

“Be my guest,” I said. “I don’t own this house or anything in it. I don’t want it, and besides, Theon has everything in hock. Take it all, Dick. I don’t care about it or you. You can take everything, but I will call the cops and tell ’em you did it. I sure will.”

Ness stood up and took a pistol from a shit-brown pocket. It was a small revolver made to look even smaller by his big hand. He pulled back the hammer as I had done with him a few mornings before.

I smiled and then grinned.

“You know what I’m gonna do, right?” he said.

I fluttered my eyelashes at him. It was the pretense of innocence that I’d used in a dozen films where I was some chaste child about to be indoctrinated into a brutal carnal world.

Dick raised his arm, leveled the pistol.

He fired. It sounded like a cap gun. Shards of shattered tile pelted my left shoulder from behind.

“You missed,” I told him.

He fired again, this time to my right.

“Maybe you should get a little closer, Dick.”

I fully expected to die in that same bathtub where my husband expired, in the place where Jolie Wins had electrocuted them both. I could have saved myself. I could have begged. I had the money for Ness in the trunk of my car. I didn’t need it. But I wasn’t going to give in. He would have to kill me and I didn’t give a damn.

Dick’s face, already crushed from a lifetime of angry blows, fell in on itself. He lowered the pistol and shook his head.

I wondered if he was looking inside himself for the strength to murder me. I had given him enough reason, enough disrespect. But he just turned around and walked out of the bathroom. I had no idea of the content of the chain reaction of emotions set off inside him.

It was late in the afternoon before I was ready to go out again. I drove my Jaguar down to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. Talia Dean was sitting at the stone desk.

Talia was young and waiflike. Her loose tie-dyed hippie dress and white sandals made her an anomaly in the house of the dead. But there was something perfect about that odd juxtaposition of intense life moving among the shadows of death.

“Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” the young woman said.

She rose and came around the marble slab to shake my hand. After this friendly and oddly perfunctory welcome she leaned forward and hugged me.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered in my ear.

Then she leaned back and stared into my eyes.

I tried to smile at her. Maybe I succeeded.

“Lewis is downstairs with your husband,” brown-haired Talia said. “I can call him and ask if he’s ready for you to come down.”

I nodded. We both went to sit at the Fred Flintstone desk. While she pressed the right buttons to get to Lewis, my red phone rang.

“Hello,” I said.

“Lewis?” Talia said on her line.

“Sandra?” Marcia Pinkney said over the red phone.

“Can Mrs. Pinkney come down to view her husband?” Talia asked.

“I decided to take you up on your offer,” Marcia said.

“She’s right here,” Talia said.

“... to come and see Theon,” Marcia concluded.

I gave Marcia the address of the mortuary while Talia hung up and waited.

After I disconnected the call the displaced hippie said, “I can take you down to see your husband now, Mrs. Pinkney.”

He was wearing a tan suit with his favorite Stetson in the coffin. I realized that Lana must have helped them get the clothes. I came into the cool, dark chamber alone. Talia had left me at the door.

Lewis was standing over the earthly remains of my poor lost husband. Theon was smiling. It was his natural smile. I had never before seen a corpse made to look as the person had in life.

Dardanelle had done a brilliant job.

“He looks just like Theon,” I said.

“It was as if he did the work himself,” Lewis told me. “The muscles of his face found that smile with the smallest urging. He was a man who enjoyed life.”

“Every minute,” I said, “like he was going to die the next day.”

“In my business you learn to take advantage of the span you’re allotted,” the undertaker told me. “We see so many who fall before their time.”

It was a simple pine coffin, unfinished as I had wanted it to be. Seeing him there I felt the emptiness created by his absence. It wasn’t so much that I missed him but that he had been there in ways that no one else ever could. Now, for the next two days at least, I would be alone.

“Could you bring a cot in here?” I asked the lanky mortician. “I’d like to spend the last night at his side.”

“That’s against policy.”

“Does that mean no?”

It was a simple canvas cot with X-crossed wooden legs at either end. The blanket was army surplus and very scratchy but that wouldn’t interrupt my sleep. I sat there next to my dead husband, thinking that he would have been happy that I didn’t have a book. The light in the small interment room was no more than forty watts — I wouldn’t have been able to read anyway.

It would have also made Theon happy if I decided to have sex with him one more time before he went into the grave. At some younger, wilder time I might have given him that last good-bye.

But that night I just sat there feeling so at ease and comfortable.

I was considering taking off my dress and lying down when a knock came on the door.

I thought it was an overly formal Dardanelle, but when I pulled the door open Marcia Pinkney stood there. I had forgotten her completely.

That night she was wearing a black dress and a dark gray hat with a gray, loose-net veil. Her eyes were still shocking in their intensity but the wan smile she had from days before had been put away.

“Is he here?” she asked.

I stepped to the side, ushering her in with the movement. Her gait was stiff-legged; so much so that I stayed close to her side in case she stumbled.

The pine coffin reminded me of Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick — the passage of death that also made room for life.

“Oh my God,” Marcia said, standing over her son.

I put my arm around her shoulder.

She reached out and wept silently. I imagined that her tears would have felt hot.

“I treated him like a dog,” she muttered.

“He acted like a dog, Marcia. That’s why I loved him.”

“You did?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Even after all he did to you?”

“Of all the doors I could have run through, his was the kindest. He never hit me and he always listened — even when he didn’t understand.”

“I could have helped you buy a better coffin,” she said.

“Come sit on the cot, Marcia.”

The coffin was set on the floor and so when we sat on the makeshift bed we could look down upon Marcia’s dead son’s smiling countenance.

“He looks very natural,” Marcia said. “I guess that sounds clichéd but it’s true.”

“You couldn’t have stopped this from happening,” I said. “I was his wife and I couldn’t do it. Theon was after something that he could never have and he was gonna push it to the limit until he went off the side.”

“But it was my fault.”

“You can’t look at it like that, Marcia. Theon was a man. You have to respect a man to live his own life, and if you do that then you have to let him be responsible.”

“But I’m his mother.”

“So let it hurt you that he’s gone. Feel the pain of his death but don’t climb in there with him.”

The old woman took me in a feeble embrace. She cried on my arm and shook in gratitude and despair. She patted my hand and whispered my name, my real name.

After all that, she leaned away and said, “Thank you. I didn’t do anything to deserve your kindness.”

She left soon after. I didn’t accompany her because I knew that Lewis would see her to her car. I was relieved to be alone again. Marcia’s emotions were too intense for death.

In the cool light, on the stiff cot next to my dead husband, life slowed down to a reasonable pace. The death chamber was cool and sedate. There were no sounds from anywhere.

If I glanced to my right I saw Theon’s smiling visage. For days I’d been hearing his voice on and off. But now that I was lying there next to him the words ceased. He was dead. I was as good as dead.

Drifting into sleep I was in the coffin with him. We were floating on a calm sea in the bright sun. We were both dead but Theon had accepted his passing and no longer had to look or think or guess. Our passage was uneventful, would always be. But for some reason I didn’t get bored or restless. Theon’s natural smile and the gentle sway of the coffin-boat on the water lulled any desire...

“Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said. He was shaking my shoulder gently.

I was naked on top of the coarse army blanket. This didn’t disturb me. I had spent my entire adult life naked in front of men, and women.

And I was like all the other naked bodies Lewis dealt with every day of his life. They were all dead, of course, but I was on that cusp too. Maybe Lewis intuited my nearness to death. I stood up, retrieved my dress from the end of the cot, and put it on.

“It’s late,” he said. “You have a visitor.”

“What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“Oh my God,” I said, remembering the same words issuing from Theon’s mom. “Who’s here?”

“She says that her name is Bertha Blueblood.”

“Hey, Deb,” the plump makeup artist and wardrobe designer said as she rolled her portable closet into the vault.

“Hi, B.”

“Oh,” she said when she saw Theon. “Wow. He looks really good. I guess that creepy old Dardanelle knows what he’s doing.”

She glanced at the cot and my rumpled dress but didn’t say anything.

She opened the movable closet and said, “It’s pretty dark in here but I got a light panel in the trunk. Let’s plug in and get to work.”

At twelve fifteen I walked out of Threadley Brothers Mortuary. My white satin dress matched the ass-length platinum blond wig, and my glasslike coral-tinted high heels lifted me five inches off the ground. My eyes were cobalt blue and I showed enough cleavage to have made Jayne Mansfield blush.

Lewis Dardanelle opened the back door to the pink stretch Cadillac limousine. Bertha got in first and I followed. Theon had already been loaded into the black hearse and was on his way to a final restlessness.

“Baby, you look great,” Bertha said when the car left the curb.

“Theon would have wanted this,” I said. “It’s the least I could do.”

When we got to the cemetery, located halfway between L.A. proper and the Valley, it was just a few minutes shy of one o’clock. Rash Vineland, in a shabby but becoming ash-colored suit, stood out in front of the chapel waiting.

He didn’t recognize me at first. I smiled at his looking around my tightfitting dress to see if his friend was going to climb out of the car.

“Aren’t you going to say hello, Rash?” I asked him.

“Sandy?”

“This is my friend Bertha. She did my clothes.”

“Hi,” he said to the wardrobe mistress.

She smiled at him and shook his hand.

Inside, the chapel was empty. There was a high podium and Theon’s coffin sat before it. The hundreds of seats were vacant except for the little pamphlets with Theon’s picture and the details of his life. I picked up one for his mother when, and if, I saw her again.

The room was appropriately empty and silent.

Rash was looking down on Theon.

“He looks very manly,” he said to me.

“He was just a boy in his heart,” I said. “Like my father and most other men.”

This pronouncement caused Rash to lower his head and once again I felt like kissing him.

And once again I did not kiss him.

“Does your girlfriend know you’re here?” I asked instead.

“I told her that I was coming,” he said. “I even told her that she could come along but she said that if I went that I shouldn’t come back.”

“Why put yourself through all that?” I asked. “Why not just stay where you are?”

“Because I... I...”

“What?”

“I looked you up on the Net.”

“My films?”

“No. They cost money. It was just a lot of parties and some famous people you’ve been seen with.”

“If you want to know something you should ask me,” I said. “And just so you’ll know — I got dressed like I used to because Theon would have liked it. This is the last time I’ll ever be seen like this.”

“You sound angry.”

It was true. I could hear the rage in my voice, feel it in my shoulders and balled-up fists.

“It’s okay,” I told the young architect. “I’m not mad at you. It’s just the last time I’m playing the role of Debbie Dare and it weighs on me.”

“You talk like a completely different person.”

“And what do you think about her?”

“I’d, I’d build her a house in the woods if she’d come live with me there.” I could tell that he’d been practicing those words.

“What if she got fat and ugly?”

“I don’t care about how you look.”

“What if I only came in the summer months and spent the rest of the year doing... I don’t know... other things?”

He nodded his acceptance of my “what if” demands. I felt a hard knot rise up in my esophagus.

“I have to go, Rash. Can we talk about this some other time?”

“I’m sorry. I know this is the wrong place.”

I turned away from my awkward suitor and approached the pulpit where Lewis Dardanelle stood wearing his forty-year-old tuxedo. He’d worn that outfit to thousands of funerals. Death permeated every fiber.

“Everything is ready, Mrs. Pinkney,” the tall man assured me. “The caterers are at your home and Talia made sure that everyone who donated has an invitation. I have only one question.”

I’d never liked Lewis. His demeanor was so practiced as to be synthetic. But now I saw something inside the man: an empathy that seemed to exist only for me.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Who will you want as pallbearers?”

“My brother Newland,” I said immediately, “and Jude Lyon because Jude was Theon’s closest friend. If Myron Palmer comes he’d be a good choice because they, they’re kind of the same. Neelo Brown can be my special representative and then Kip Rhinehart and Chas Mintoff. All you need is six, right?”

The undertaker smiled and lowered his head in a half nod.

“Anything else, Lewis?”

“I assume that you won’t be having a religious ceremony.”

I smiled and said, “No. No minister is coming.”

“So what will be the order of speakers?”

“I’d like you to say a few words.”

“Me?”

“I know that Theon would come down to Threadley’s sometimes to see you. I have no idea what you guys used to do, but I know he came home in a cab as many times as he drove.”

“I’d be honored,” Dardanelle said.

“Then you could introduce Jude Lyon. I’ll be the last speaker, after that.”

“I’ll make sure that Mr. Lyon sits up front with you.”

As Dardanelle walked away a voice said, “Let me take a look at you, hon.”

It was Bertha. She came at me holding a palette of various kinds of makeup.

“Sit down so I can get to your face, Miss Amazon,” she said.

She worked on my forehead and cheeks, lips and neck. She ran a comb through my fake hair and then looked me over.

“How do I look?”

“Just like Theon would’a wanted you to.”

Flower arrangements had arrived by the dozens. Huge frames of every color and kind. These concealed the seats next to the podium and I went back there to hide from the growing crowd.

The mourners were filing in by then. You could hear the din of their conversation and sporadic laughter. The people who attended the funerals of our kind were given to laughter and tears, alcohol and drugs, violent outbursts and deep depression.

It was not unusual for a suicide or two to come in the wake of any event like Theon’s.

They would be well dressed, some scantily so, as everyone would want to be seen as well as pay their respects. Funerals for our crowd were literal celebrations, like the primitive peoples of Europe reveling in life and death before a dour Christian God stripped them of their phallic symbols and painted faces.

I caught glimpses of them through the heavy foliage. The dominant theme was black cloth and cleavage but there was a good deal of pink and scarlet and white. There was a lot of kissing and hugging and holding on. Two film crews took over the back of the chapel. The back row, in front of the cameras, was occupied by a dozen well-known porn directors.

I could see no toddlers or children. There were a few babies in young women’s arms. Maybe one or two of them belonged to Theon. He’d once bragged to me that he’d fathered a child of every race on the planet.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was playing. Lewis knew Theon well enough that he didn’t have to ask me about the music.

I was secure behind that hedge of memorial offerings and yet still had a feeling of belonging. The service was like a going away party for both Theon and me. By then I had definitely decided to use my father’s pistol to kill myself in the creditors’ house after the wake for my husband. The feeling of comradeship and certain death caressed me and the world was right — for once.

“Hey, Deb,” Jude Lyon said. He was wearing a beautifully tailored medium gray suit with a bluish shirt and a scarlet-and-royal-blue tie.

“You look good, Jude.”

“Every time Theon saw this suit he asked for my tailor’s name.”

The little assassin sat down next to me. He grabbed my hand with unexpected strength and said, “I know this must be hard for you.”

“It’s the life we lived.”

“Have you had any more problems?”

That was the first time I realized that I had not called the cops on Ness. He had come into my house and shot at me. But it meant nothing.

“No,” I said. “I think that little talk you had with Coco settled it all.”

“Call me if you have any more trouble,” he said. “That’s the very least I can do.”

I could see in his eyes that Jude was nervous. He had a folded piece of paper gripped in the fingers of his left hand — the speech no doubt.

When I put my free hand on his he shuddered.

“It’s okay, Jude,” I said. “This is what he would have wanted you to do.”

An inquisitive light came into the college-educated killer’s eye.

“Do you understand who I am, Deb?”

“I don’t understand a damn thing, J. All I know is that I have to keep on movin’ forward and for this little stretch of road you and me are on it together.”

I could tell he wanted to say something, just a sentence of agreement or harmony, but instead Jude put his head down and let it bounce in a little nod.

The crowd was getting louder. Bold men and saucy women were sharing memories and despair. The chatter seemed to be an attempt at holding off the silence that was so deep inside that chapel.

The chapel was almost as large as the Rock of Ages House of Worship where my family prayed — but the big church at Day’s Rest was a house of Death, not hope. The only reason people gathered there was because someone had died. There were no Sunday school lessons or weddings in this place. The transient parishioners bellowed and laughed, keened and cried to keep off the extraordinary quietude and the inescapable reality that no proper house of worship could ever really contain.

I closed my eyes and let the sounds of the mourners’ words and laughter wash over me. Again I had the feeling of being far out at sea. I couldn’t make out the individual words and sentences of the babbling gurgle, but I understood the meanings of the rising and lowering octaves.

All this brought a smile to my face.

“Are you ready, Mrs. Pinkney?” Lewis Dardanelle asked.

I opened my eyes, realizing that I had drifted into dreams while waiting for the service. It seemed so perfect that a chuckle escaped my lips.

Dardanelle was shocked and that pleased me. He was so used to being in charge of the final interment. Not only did he orchestrate but he knew every emotion and action that went through the minds of the principals. My nearly joyous ejaculation threw him off his game and that brought out a stronger laugh.

“Do you need a moment to collect yourself?” he asked, still flummoxed by the sudden lightness of my mood.

“Absolutely not.”

Lewis turned away, walked out into the public eye, and took the few steps up to the podium. There was a control board up there that he used to turn the music down, but not off.

The clamor of the mourners lowered to hushed whispers.

The tall coffin banger (as he was sometimes referred to by the women who fucked him in his casket-bed) cleared his throat and the whispering stopped.

“I have been asked to say a few words before the next speakers,” he said in his deep, soft voice. “This is unusual because I almost always represent the funeral home and not the deceased.

“But in this case the family is known to me. Theon Pinkney was a frequent client.” Lewis stopped and showed a rare honest smile. “Not, of course, in his current state. No. Theon took care of his friends. If someone in his trade died penniless and alone, Theon brought them to me and paid for the services. If some poor bereft mother or daughter or spouse could not handle the work it takes to make the transition, Theon was there to lend a hand. He knew as much about this business as I do. He knew about the embalming chemicals and brands of coffins, state and city ordinances, and the many denominations that would and would not speak for the dead.

“This of course refers to Theon only as far as my business life goes. Most of you know me. The only role any, or at least most of you, have seen me fill is the funeral director — the undertaker who takes your loved ones away.”

Lewis stopped there for a good quarter of a minute. I believe a real emotion was passing through him, a memory of someone he was or might have been.

“But Theon knew me in other ways. Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and call me at the mortuary. ‘Hey, Lew,’ he’d say, ‘what you doin’ down there tonight.’ ”

What shocked me was how much Lewis was able to sound like my husband.

“Often I was deep in my work,” Dardanelle said, continuing, “but some nights I was just sitting around in the office. Theon would come over with a deck of cards and a bottle of... mineral water.”

That got a few laughs. Theon always called cognac his mineral water.

“We’d play for matchsticks and drink, trading stories of what happened at work that day. We both practiced interesting trades.”

More laugher.

“One evening I remember Theon telling me how he had to get on the set and stop a jealous lover from strangling his girlfriend on camera. The man was much bigger and more powerful than Theon, but he wouldn’t let that young girl die...”

Lewis was referring to Tina Bottoms — at least, that was her screen name. Her boyfriend, who went only by the moniker Turk, had gotten it into his head to immortalize them both by killing her on film.

Turk broke Theon’s arm, jaw, and ankle, but my husband saved that girl and helped her move back to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she’d been born.

“He was a good man and he treated me as a friend,” Lewis said. “He never made fun of me or my predilections, and he loved his wife. I will think of him every time work slows down and I am sitting at my desk wondering what is it that I’m missing.”

Again there was silence from the podium. That stillness seemed to fill the great hall of death. At least thirty seconds passed before the undertaker could bring himself to speak again.

“There will be only two other speakers at this service. The first will be the deceased’s good friend Jude Lyon. Mr. Lyon will be followed by Theon’s wife, Sandra Peel-Pinkney.

“Those of you who donated to this service have already been informed about where the wake will be held. There you will each be given a chance to drink mineral water and toast the dead.”

Dardanelle walked away from the podium and down into the pews. A few seconds passed and the audience began to shift in their seats. I was moved by the friendship Lewis evinced in those few words. It showed me something about Theon that I knew but rarely witnessed — he was a good friend to a certain kind of man: an outcast who had something to offer but with few takers. He felt comfortable with people like Jude and Lewis, and with him, they belonged.

Something was wrong. I went through all the things I knew at that moment, trying to find out what had misfired. I was dressed the way I should be. The room was full of Theon’s friends. Rash was in the audience...

“Jude,” I said. “Jude.”

I reached out to touch his arm but he grabbed my wrist before I could. His grip was hard.

“You have to go up there, baby,” I said.

He gazed in my eye. He was an angry child caught in his own conflicting desires.

Then he let me go, jumped to his feet, and scurried out onto the dais. He tripped on the first stair, caught himself, and then stepped slowly up to the podium.

Lewis had adjusted the microphone for his great height and so Jude brought it down and twisted the snakelike metal stalk until the little receiver was there at his lips.

He cleared his throat and looked around. He turned to me and I gave him my best smile.

He turned back to the audience and then remembered the folded-up paper in his hand. This he unfolded and placed on the podium before him. Then, for an uncomfortable span of time, he read the words silently to himself. I wondered if he thought that he was reading out loud and the assembly could hear him.

I was about to get up and go out to him when he raised his head.

“Theon Pinkney was my best friend,” he said in a voice that was flinty and certain. “I don’t really know what I meant to him but he was my best, best friend.”

Jude splayed out his right hand over his chest. I thought that this was maybe the only time I’d seen the real man.

“Person of interest,” he said then. “That’s what I’ve been called many times. A person of interest. That’s not a good thing, not at all. I mean... it’s good for the person who others are interested in insofar as it’s good that they’re interested, because that makes you special — unique. But at the same time” — I realized then that Jude was not reading from the creased page in front of him — “it means that there’s a whole world out there wanting to tear you down. They want to catch you, imprison you, maybe even take your life. A man,” he said, and then he glanced at me, “or a woman who rises to the level of interest is something special. While everyone else is following canned music they’re moving away, looking for their own.

“Theon Pinkney was a person of interest. He had a big stomach, a big heart, and a big dick” — a laugh or two came from the hall of death — “and he didn’t care who knew it. He’d take off his clothes in a minute and lick his lips after throwing back a big slug of brandy. He was afraid of death; I know that because like Mr. Dardanelle, death is my stock-in-trade. Theon was afraid of dying but being fearless in the face of death isn’t much. It isn’t anything. The thing I loved about Theon was that he wasn’t afraid of tomorrow. When the sun came up he looked around to see what there was on the horizon. He’d watch a ball game and then go to his mother’s church when he knew she wouldn’t be there. He flew off to Morocco the day after nine-eleven to see if the world looked different.

“Another thing about Theon was that he was a natural-born filmmaker. Not like these Hollywood fools with their automatic robots and ridiculous, impossible love stories. Theon saw the world he lived in today, the world we all live in. He knew what people wanted and what exhilarated them. He knew what you needed even when you didn’t.

“No one has ever touched my life the way he did. And I’m sorry he’s dead but I am happier, by far, that he lived.”

Jude turned away from the podium and paused for a moment to make sure that he didn’t tumble down the stairs. He walked stiff-legged back to his chair, where he sat down and bowed his head.

Lewis recorded every word spoken at the podium. For the first time I was happy about that. I wanted the words that Jude spoke to live on.

I waited for the pulse of Jude’s speech to pass and then I walked out onto the stage with my ass-length platinum hair and fiery cobalt eyes, in five-inch coral heels. I stalked up to that podium like I was going to do the salsa with it. I pulled on that microphone until it reached my lips and I touched the off-center white bull’s-eye inside the faux tattoo on my cheek. My nostrils flared and the chill of the room braced my black skin. Whenever I moved I heard the white satin slide against my body, and I was home — if only for a moment.

“All my years with Theon have brought me to this place,” I said. “It was like he was driving here from a million miles away and stopped to pick me up on the side of the road. ‘What’s this little black girl doin’ out here?’ he said when he saw me. ‘Anything you want, Daddy.’ And ever since then we’ve been together. I was his tenant, his costar, his girlfriend, and his wife. He loved me and hated me and stomped out the front door more times than I can count. He’s fucked more women than any basketball player or U.S. senator. He’s crossed almost every line that they put down in church.

“I went with him willingly but I hate where I’ve ended up. I love the people in this room but I can’t stand what we do to each other. It’s not like I think we’re less than the people who live out in the straight world buying our videos and looking to see if we bleed. We’re better than them because we know that there’s no difference between men and women, black and white, Christian and Jew, young and old.

“We know better but that’s not enough. We pay for that knowledge with drug addiction and STDs. We suffer from the people who feel alive only when watching our asses on electronic screens. We are beaten and raped and spit on. They pay us for this and we smile our bloody smiles and learn to pretend even when we know better.”

That wasn’t my speech. I had yet to unfold the papers in front of me. That was merely my recognition of the familiar faces in that room. I’d had sex with at least half of them.

“But none of that is why I’m here. I mean, I do love you. We have blazed a trail across the imagination of the world. They may not like it, they might not like us, but here we are, bound together to say good-bye to one of our own.

“We’ve come here to celebrate him, but Theon has been the star before. In movies, behind the camera, on the red carpet, and winning every award they have to offer. I don’t mean Theon but Axel Rod — the self-proclaimed hardest-working cock in the Valley.”

That got me some grins and guffaws.

“Theon was an imperfect man in an imperfect world,” I continued. “A child died on his lap. A little girl, barely sixteen. All she had was the beauty of youth and the desire and the willingness to climb out of the shit of her childhood. She died fucking my husband in our big bathtub and he died reaching for her, because in her fractured youth he saw himself just like he saw himself in me when I was her age.

“She was born Myrtle May but she called herself Jolie Wins.”

I gazed around the great chamber and saw that every eye was on me. That brought a smile to my lips, not because I needed to be the center of attention but because that was a tough crowd and you had to tell the truth to keep their interest.

“When I met her I was looking at her backside and she was on her knees in front of some fat wannabe. She was high and didn’t even know where she was. She called me miss and asked me to help her. I tried. I did. But, as we all know, there’s no help for the likes of us.

“Her story was the same old, same old — her panties and Daddy’s dick, Mother making noise in another part of the trailer, and the sun shining outside just like nothing ever happened. In a lot of rooms words like that would call up tears and indignation, but in here we’ve all heard it and felt it one way or another.

“I took her by the hand and brought her to what I thought was a safe harbor. I gave her my private number and a promise I could not keep.

“She and Theon found each other and saw in each other’s eyes the dreams that they always had. They grabbed at each other, not for sex or solace but for hope. They were outlaws on the run just like the rest of us.

“And I believe that Mr. Dardanelle and Jude are outlaws too. I believe that Theon would want us to remember them and Myrtle May, because he did have a big heart and he wanted something that he knew he could not have, but that never kept him from trying.

“We are that something. We are the scenes on the wide-screen plasma TVs that millions watch every night hoping for something that they can never have. They stay in their condos and trailers. They go to work and talk about the newest cop show but that’s not what they’re feeling.

“Myrtle May left home when she was just a child. She died still a child. Theon was so lost that he might have even thought that he was helping her. He thought that he had saved me — I did too. But that was never true. We aren’t in the saving business. We are down-to-the-bone serious and at risk. We are, and Theon was, all the pain that happens on the back alleyway that leads between the bank doors and the church.

“And so I am here in the persona of Debbie Dare to tell you what Theon should have said to Myrtle May.

“Save yourself. Know that you can do anything. Don’t look down on anyone. Don’t forgive them or condemn them. And when they tell you to get down on your knees, you tell them to get down there with you. Tell them that you can take the pain if they will too.”

What happened immediately after those last words is a blur to me. I think I just stood there staring for a while until Jude came up and led me off the stage. From there Lewis brought me to the side of the coffin, where I was joined by Lana Leer. She was wearing a simple black dress that went down to her calves and was shod in white pumps.

I came to myself standing there next to the open coffin. Theon still looked natural, almost as if he might open his eyes at any moment.

“That was a beautiful eulogy,” Lana whispered.

“I never got to the words I’d written,” I said. “I just kinda got lost up there.”

“It was still wonderful,” my little friend said. “It touched a lot of people. You gave ’em a lot to think about.”

Lewis had gone out among the mourners and was lining them up along the left side of the pews.

“Are you ready?” Lana asked.

“Ready for what?”

“For the people to walk by and pay their final respects.”

“Oh.” For some reason this responsibility had escaped me. “Sure.”

Moana Bone was the first in line. Her once fine features were heavy, made more so by an overabundance of makeup. Her body had thickened to the point where she had no real figure anymore.

With surprising strength she gripped my hands and said, “I’m very sorry for you, my dear. What you said up there is in the hearts of all us whores. We do the heavy lifting and they flush us down anyway.”

“Do you know my name?” I asked, feeling numb and reckless.

“They call you Debbie Dare in the cast list, but your real name is Sandra Peel. I always loved Theon but you were better for him than I could have ever been.”

Her eyes were on mine like some kind of emotional predator tracking down a simple nod.

“Hey, Deb,” Myron Palmer said after Moana wandered off. Standing next to him was a mousy woman wearing a loose, dark green shift. Her face was once pretty and her gestures recalled that younger beauty.

“I wanted to thank you for letting me be a pallbearer,” Myron said. “You know, I really liked Theon and, and, and I styled myself after him as much as I could.”

“Thank you, Myron.”

I shook his hand, which was both soft and strong, and then offered the same gesture to the woman he was with. She took the proffered hand and said, “You have my condolences, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Have we met?”

“No. I’m Myron’s friend Nora.”

“Brathwait?”

“He told you about me?”

“You were the love of his life. I don’t think he’s had a single day where he hasn’t thought of you.”

“Your speech was beautiful,” she said. “Myron and I have just reconnected over Facebook recently. I’m trying to get him to leave this profession and do something else — maybe still in film.”

Our middle-aged Russian housekeeper, Julia Slatkin, came up after half an hour.

“I am so sorry for you, my child,” she said.

“You didn’t have to come to this zoo, Julia.”

“I love you and your people,” she said. “Theon was a good man. He was a man and so he was always a little lost. Men are like boys and sometimes the only thing we can do is put them to bed.”

I hadn’t even been worried about crying until she spoke those words.

“He did awful things,” I said.

“And he has paid for them,” she replied with Jude-like certainty. “There’s only so much revenge that God can ask on any man’s soul.”

“Those were really nice words you spoke up there,” hunched-over Kip Rhinehart said after what seemed like hours of pity and commiserations.

I was thinking of how lovely it would be to sit down in the polar bear room, bring my father’s pistol (the pistol that failed to save his life) to my temple, and pull the trigger...

“I heard,” Kip, the canyon cowboy, went on, “that you’re havin’ money troubles and might not be able to make that mortgage. If that’s so you’re welcome to come up and live in one’a my rooms. It gets a little lonely up there and... and I wouldn’t bother you or anything. I’m kinda old for that nonsense.”

I was imagining the red spray across the white fabric that I chose to accent my ebony skin.

“You think about what I said,” Kip muttered after I thanked him.

Linda Love came up with a small band of directors. They said the right words but didn’t really mean them. A has-been actor was just that in their business. Neelo Brown shook my hand and kissed my cheek. He’d been an awkward adolescent — a virgin at eighteen. It was decided among his aunties that I would be the one to initiate him into the sexual life. I took him down to Ensenada for his birthday and came into his room after a night of dinner and trying to teach him how to dance. I did it to build his confidence but after that he was always a little in love with me.

Anna Karin, Newly, Perry Mendelson, Chas and Darla the accountants, and my son’s guardian, Delilah, came up singularly and in pairs. All the while I was thinking about Suicide — that handsome man who joined me every once in a while, all silence and smiles.

Toward the end of the procession two men wearing identical suits and faces approached me. They were pale and thin, of equal and normal height, but still they seemed small. Their eyes were barely gray and their lips... nonexistent. The one on the left walked up to me and took my hand. “John,” he said, and then moved my hand to his brother, who said, “Ronald.”

“Threadley,” they both said together. It was like a routine from an old-time vaudeville act.

“We rarely involve ourselves with the day-to-day,” Ronald said.

“But we felt driven to come here and say our good-byes to your husband,” John added.

“It’s not the business he brought us,” Ronald said.

“... but his belief in our ability to provide the requisite care,” the brother added.

I wondered which one was born first and if they’d die on the same day.

I thanked them and smiled for them. I almost told them that we’d be seeing each other soon.

Before the coffin was sealed I tucked Myrtle May’s unopened diary next to Theon’s heart. The night-blue-and-chrome hearse was parked outside. People had been drifting away toward the burial site. It was up on a hill, I was told, a place where anyone visiting could look out on the faraway mountains or down on the valley where Theon grunted and strained and came on command.

Almost everyone had gone. I was standing in front of the chapel waiting for Lewis to come with a car for me. The Threadley brothers were there, and Lana too.

I felt the weight of the past week or so lift from me. The day was sunny and gorgeous. I said good-bye to the world then and there. It would be my last day and that was a deep relief.

I could finally let go.

“Bitch!” a woman yelled.

I turned to my right. A light-skinned black woman wearing jeans and a pink blouse was rushing at me. There was something in her hand. I knew immediately what was happening. The woman was certainly Annabella Atoll, Rash’s girlfriend. She had, I imagined, come from a background like mine and saw Rash as a good partner to move away from what she was. He saw in her a life that he had missed, but when she sloughed off the old skin he lost interest and then met me.

The knife arced down across the left side of my face, slicing through skin and eye with razor-sharp accuracy. Then almost immediately came the upthrust under my right breast. There was pain but not that much.

The twins were amazing. One of them tackled Annabella. Her strength was fueled by hate-driven adrenaline, though, and she almost threw him off. But Lana grabbed something and hit my would-be killer in the head — twice. While my friend and one twin subdued Annabella, the other twin lowered me to the ground and applied pressure to the wounds.

I could hear my rasping breath and see Suicide just behind John — or maybe it was Ronald. There was screaming and hollering and I was back in the living room where my father stumbled in and died. My good eye was open wide; I knew this but saw nothing. The world around me was moving but I was absolutely still. This contradiction seemed like a great revelation to me.

Waking up in Neelo’s clinic was not a big surprise, not really. There were oxygen tubes in my nostrils and other plastic hoses down my throat. My left eye was bandaged and a searing pain ran down that side of my face.

“Sandy?” Lana Leer said. She was looking down at me with fear in her eyes.

I tried to smile but I don’t think she could tell.

“You’re gonna be okay,” she said in a voice that was anything but certain. “They arrested that crazy bitch and put her in jail. Neelo says that your eye and lung got cut up pretty bad but—”

“That’s enough for right now,” Jude Lyon said, interrupting my chatterbox friend.

I turned to see his concerned countenance. The person of interest smiled at me. There was no promise in that smile but I felt his caring. I could see the coldness in his eyes beyond the everyday human attention. There was also an inkling I had that something had changed in the person he was seeing.

“Your friend the doctor is doing all that he can,” Jude said. “That woman cut you up pretty bad but you’re in good hands.”

After that I passed into unconsciousness. For all intents and purposes I was dead.

When I awoke again the tubes were gone but my eye was still bandaged. Neelo came to see me soon after I’d regained consciousness.

“You’re gonna be all right, Aunt Deb,” he said, showing more relief than I felt. “It was tough going there for a while. We had to drain your lungs every day for three weeks and you were on life support for half that time. I’m actually surprised that you survived.

“I brought in seven specialists to operate on that eye. We still don’t know how your vision will be affected. But you’re gonna live, Aunt Deb. You know I love you. It would have killed me if you died.”

After that day the visitors started coming. It was like Theon’s death procession but over a greater length of time. Neelo’s words stuck with me.

Rash didn’t come but sent a note with Lana.

A few days later a woman lawyer named Katya Corvine came to get me to put on record that I was having an affair with Rash. I agreed and also documented that I bore no ill will toward my attacker.

There was a noticeable scar down the left side of my face, and when the eye patch was removed I saw an odd double image out of that eye. My face in the mirror looked a little off because of my impaired vision and disfigurement. But to me it was all good. The wounds inflicted were like a surgeon’s incisions, cutting out a deep, ancient infection.

I no longer wanted to die.

When Delilah and Edison were allowed in to see me I told my son that we would live together on a mountain overlooking the ocean.

“What about Mama Delilah?” my caring boy asked.

Kip Rhinehart had already agreed to all three of us living in his abandoned school.

“She can live with us as long as she wants.”

Edison cheered. Delilah had already agreed.

Delilah and Edison drove me from the canyon and as soon as I was better I got a job as a waitress at a seafood house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

One day, a little more than a year after Theon’s funeral, Edison was sitting on my lap as we watched the sun settle into the Pacific. He ran a finger down the trail of the scar on my face.

“Does it hurt you, Mama?” he asked.

“No, baby,” I said. “It reminds me.”

“Of what?”

“When I feel it going down my face I think that it’s a road my life took to this place.”

“A scary road with ghosts?”

“No. It’s just the way I had to go to get here with you.”

“And Mama Delilah an’ Uncle Kip,” he added.

“Yes.”

There was a seriousness beyond Eddie’s tender years in his face. And farther than that, beyond this childhood wisdom, there was a lovely California sunset and I felt that I had arrived at a place where no one could bring me down on my knees.